Into the Wood
by Walter Gilman
Summary: A divergence after Blackwater.
1. Chapter 1

It was late in the night when he came back.

She'd heard waves of footsteps running on the steps, a choked shout; she'd been hidden under the cloak for a long hour when she heard footsteps again. They were much heavier but unsteady, and she knew before the door opened that it was him again and not Ilyn Payne. He came in clanking on a gust of stink, holding a jute sack, and his face was terrible. She breathed, and waited. _If I scream, someone worse will come_. He walked to her, swaying, and held down a crusted hand to her. _I won't, I can't_, she thought, but the hand stayed there, and with a sense of falling, she took it.

He pulled her to her feet, pushed her over to her bed, and stood in the center of her room, breathing like a bull and looking around in the dim light. When he turned to face her, his eyes had narrowed and she couldn't see them at all.

"You're going, you know. Can't stay."

She felt her mouth dry. The words clogged in her, she could barely get them out. "I can't go now, I have to wait, I just– I have to wait–" She shook her head pleadingly, the words gone.

He gazed at her. "Some ship in the night? Luck for you. Who helms it, do you think? Not who they told you, I'll bet on that."

"I can't–" _It doesn't matter, tell him, he's leaving anyway_. "Ser–Ser Dontos. There really is a ship, and–" She stopped at the sight of his face.

He had blinked at her, stood wavering. Then his face split. She'd never seen him truly laugh before; she was mesmerized as his good side creased and the other rippled shallowly after it, slower, like a reflection in a pool. He laughed until he gagged, then caught himself and shook his head, swallowing. A tear caught in the crack of scar below his eye and he rubbed it away, still shuddering. "Dontos. All right, then, have Dontos. I'll… Ah, you're too young, a pity. I'll tell you later and see how you like it."

The Hound went to her wardrobe and leaned into it, dug through the chest at the bottom. She watched, shaking, as he pulled out her dresses, tossing away the new ones until he reached the layer of heavy dresses from home. Those he crumpled up with her cloak and dropped in the sack. Then he turned, absently knocking the bag against his leg so the contents settled, and looked at her, blank-faced, his underlip jutting. As if measuring. It was then that she realized.

Her body moved much too slow, far too slow in her shock. She'd barely gotten to the door when his arm came around her shoulders, heavy like a gate, and pinned her back against his armoured ribs. The other hand, wiry and overlarge and smelling sharp of copper coins, clenched over her mouth before she could finish the scream. Biting didn't change its grip at all. He looked down at her, over her head, his lank hair falling in her face. "Easy now," he muttered, but from her angle his grimace seemed more of a smile. She bit harder, gnashed, and the penny taste of his blood filled her mouth. "Easy," he said again, louder and with anger in it, and the wet hand was gone and replaced just as fast with the sash from her grey dress. She felt him knot it behind her head, felt some hair go in with the knot.

"Worst thing. I know. You'll scream if I don't and then we both die, me now and you later. Hold still and–" She writhed away, but he still held the ends of the sash. He pushed her down to the bed, swung down and caught her ankles together in one hand. They ground together in his grip as he bound them. It took him longer to catch her wrists. She watched his face while he tied them; he was masked in dried blood and it had pooled to black clots in the stubbled line under his jaw. Both sides matched now, she saw, his good side so crusted it looked a scar. _Is any of it his._ Her stomach dropped. The meager fight she'd had left her; her breath was gone. She closed her eyes and kept them closed as he lifted her, set her feet on the bag on the floor. She felt the edges of the sack draw up over her, and that was that.


	2. Chapter 2

She was in the bag; she was over his shoulder with his hand on the small of her back, she was caught; there was only the bag and the hand and bright, bright terror.

She brought her bound wrists before her face and scratched. The bag was rough but her nails could find no purchase. Shreds of jute blew in her eyes and she stopped scratching. It was hot, yeasty; her ribs were bunched over him and she could tell by the way her face felt heavy that her head was hanging downwards. The gag was dripping across her cheek. _If I keep crying, I'll drown._ He was going down steps, endlessly; her chin knocked against her wrists, over and over. She felt his hand tighten on her back. Then he was walking quick on level ground. He shouted, loud, and his voice came clear from just behind her head. _Unhelmed still;_ _oh thank gods, thank gods,_ and she knew what to do, a clear clean thought through the terror, she reached back into her hair with difficulty, twisting her head down into her bound hands. The long pin that held her hair came out easy but he jounced down a step and it fell from her fingers against the jute. She scrabbled and caught it. He was walking steady now, slower, and she tensed and listened. There was his breath, in; out, this hard curve his shoulder, this is his back–and she twisted towards him and felt at her elbow the ridged lip of his breastplate. The laboured breathing came from above there. She held the pin in her fist, its point facing back at her elbow. _Please, please, let it hit. I'm so sorry for everything I've done_, and she twisted back and in one convulsion punched the pin through the bag as hard as she could. It met elastic resistance, popping back towards her palm, then pushed in slow. _Skin_, she thought, panicking, _his neck, I've done it._

He stopped walking. She tensed herself for the fall, but instead, she felt a tug at the pin still tight in her fingers. Slowly, slowly it pulled from her grip and slid through the bag, and it was gone. She felt the man beneath her shudder. Then, heartbreakingly, behind her head came his laugh: rasping, delighted, and then his hand was patting her back. She screamed into the sash, but it was hardly a sound at all, more like a wasp drone in her own ears than a scream.

"Brave little bird. But feel how high you are?" The voice was soft, slurred. "I'd hate to drop you." Screaming made her retch; she stopped. The voice continued, whispering. "Think you're the only one being carried out in a bag? You should see it out here. I let you go, you'll be picked right back up by someone else." He started walking again, and she swayed limp with his movement. The terror went to black. She closed her eyes and breathed and thought of nothing. He was shouting again, moving quick, rapid jerking movements, and she ignored it all.

When he finally stopped, it was colder, and it was green in the bag. He shifted her, lowered her feet down and she fell, numb. The bag scraped her face as he pulled it down, righted her with hard hands on her shoulders, and he was squatting, his face close to hers. In the pale green she could see his eyes swimming, and his breath was acidic with bile. She didn't care. She shut her eyes against him.

"Look at me." The fingers tensed, painfully, and she opened her eyes. He was so close she couldn't focus; one watery grey eye, wavering in front of her. His breath was a hot wash against her face. He put his cheek against her ear and she felt the dried blood flaking off.

"We're going to ride, now, and you'll not scream. If you do, I'll just leave you. Do you understand?" She remembered how Lollys had staggered when she'd been brought back, and she nodded against his cheek. He pulled away and looked at her. "If you fall off the horse, you're going to die."

She nodded, and looked away. _Lollys had blood on her legs, Lollys had blood in her mouth._ They were outside the stable, and it was late night, but the sky was green and dully lit like dawn. Horses were screaming; horses and men together, overlapping. Shadowed figures ran around them in the murky green. He leaned her against him, rough, and untied her ankles, but she found she had no breath to run and a lassitude had taken her. The air smelled like burnt wood, and also a kitchen smell, as of a roast. He was sawing at the knot behind her head and she felt some of her hair going with it.

Then she could breathe, took cold gasps– bright and sharp in her lungs, too cold– and coughed, and gagged. His hands cupped her ribcage and he lifted her atop the packed black horse. It was so tall, terrifyingly tall. She tried clumsily to sit sidesaddle, but the Hound pulled her leg over and then was behind her. His armour was cold. The mailed arm came around her shoulders to pin her to him again, as it had in her room; his chin knocked against the crown of her head when he bent and muttered, "I will leave you. Believe me." She felt his thighs tense, and the horse leapt, and was gone.


	3. Chapter 3

The way was seething with men shoving and running in the green dark. She rode jerking against the arm and watched as the great horse parted them in its wake, clanking, ears back. Men dove from it, and from the man above her, who was cursing and swinging and laughing. _They don't even see me, they only see the horse, no one cares, no one knows_. She gaped at the swirl of ash-covered faces below her; all were running and none met her eye, none saw her at all. _We'll be stopped at the Iron Gate, he has no cloak now and no helm and they'll bring me back_; and then she remembered his scarred face, and her chest ached. _No, they'll know him, and they'll never stop him_. The swirl of men became a crush; now there were women and men pushing barrows, pushing carts, there were wagons and goats, all tumbling together, and the black horse clove through them all. There were high screams under her and the horse stumbled but didn't slow. _Does it think it's in war?_ and then she realized, dully, _it is in war, we are in war_.

The great grey portcullis in its stone wall loomed before them, wreathed in ash. Relief pounded through her, but then they were closer, and she saw. _It's open. The Queen had it closed, how can it be open again? _People were stumbling over lumpy piles in the mud all before the gate; from one lump, a single slender mailed arm reached straight up, the fingers bent.

"There's all your knights, girl, look. See that? By morn they'll be just a part of the road." His mutter was close above her ear. The horse trod over the shabby armoured piles, and when Sansa looked down, she saw a wagon rut etched over the dented backplate of a man buried facedown in the mud. She looked away, swimming, and the arm around her curled.

They were through the gate then, and the rush of men had not stopped. They were coming and going equally, in equal panic, hundreds of them, swarming and shouting. She saw, ahead, men and women crawling over an enormous tipped haywain that blocked the way, the muddy axles in the air, the downed team still. One woman was standing to the side of the road, screeching, holding her throat. Sansa met her gaze for a second, and the glassy eye rolled over her and away.

The man behind her shifted and the horse, blowing, stepped out of the mud of the road and into the wide gutter, then began picking its way through the brush. She felt brambles snagging her skirts, little bites pulling her. The wood was sparse and lit soft green from the clouds behind her, and soon the screaming from the road had faded to muted caws. People ran past through the brush, dark figures, not many and now, less. In the new quiet she could hear the horse's frothy blowing and the breathing of the man above her. It was still acrid, but it was steady and slow. _Calm_, she thought, _all of this, and he's been calm_, and she stilled, and watched the wood ahead, past the horse's nodding brow.


	4. Chapter 4

My sincere thanks to Nysandra, who edited this for me and showed me how to finish it, and to Bubug, who illustrated it so incredibly. Thank you so much... -W.G.

They rode all through the long, long night. The green faded away, was gone, was black, and then was glowing with the dawn. She nodded against the arm and woke in fear over and over again, until she was unsure if she was awake or asleep, and still the horse kept on. The wood had become dense and the horse picked and danced. They went through shallow streams, up a low ridge, a long pale field like a shallow sea in the moonlight, then down, into grey-purple dales. Then it was bright morning and there were birds everywhere above them in the trees and crackling brush, and no smoke at all.

It was in a middle of a scattered clearing that he brought the horse to a halt. He lifted her off slowly and she found she couldn't stand, and so she lay where he'd left her. The horse was crusted with salt and the Hound unpacked it, muttering to it and coughing while he brushed. She closed her eyes, the sun bright orange through the film of her lids. The lassitude returned, slow and throbbing. She thought of her mother, and then of Cersei, stroking the back of her neck, smiling her soft smile at Ilyn Payne. _My other mother_. It crushed her a bit, that thought. _But now no mothers at all and I'm away in a wood_. How would her mother ever know, ever hear, that she had not burned with all the others, had not staggered bloodied back through the gate, like Lollys, a little girl stumbling. _Oh, Arya, oh no_. A bright flash of Arya, running. She pushed the thought away, hard. _Everything in the world is gone. _

When she woke, not long later, the man was crouching beside her and he had bread in his hand. In the bright light he was again so much bigger than she, and with his face, weary and flaked with ash and blood, he was like a fiend from a nightmare; but he had bread. It was dried and salted; she took it quickly from his hand and turned away to eat it.

He settled down across from her and ate his. The girl avoided his eye, chewed her hard bread.

"It's a long ride. You remember, you've made it before. Be longer now as we're going through the wood. No roads. You'll do what I say."

She shuddered into her bread. "Where are we going?"

He regarded her with disdain. "North. Like I said. Had you forgot what I said? Did you forget where we went? We went out the Iron Gate." He swallowed, frowning. "Don't ask questions. Listen to me and don't ask, after this. You'll end up with your people, can't say who, yet. Someone North. It'll take a long time through the wood. If you try to run, you'll not make it far. If you meet someone in the wood, and you tell them what I've done," he leaned forward, tapped her knee, "I'll bury them right beside you, and go North on my own. Do you understand?"

She understood, and turned away, blinking. Her eyes were hot and sore. He rose and pulled the jute sack from the pile he'd unpacked from the horse, and threw it to her. In it were her dresses, all dusty with shreds of jute, and below it was a blanket pallet, more bread, some rags. "That's your bed. You should take care of your own bed. I don't expect you'll be good for a thing, but at least you can carry your bed." He stretched, dug back through the pile. "I'm going in the wood, and you'll stay here and go to sleep. I won't be far, I'll be able to see you. Remember what I said, about running." She nodded, wretched, and laid out her pallet. It was boiled grey wool, bristling with horsehair, and she looked at it for a long time, long after he'd walked off. She thought of running, hiding somewhere he couldn't find, but then she remembered the butcher's boy, and so she lay on her pallet instead.

Eventually, she fell asleep in the sun.


	5. Chapter 5

She woke to the sun setting, and the coughing of the Hound.

There was a small fire, crackling, and stretched above it on a spit was half a smoking hare. He'd washed his face of the blood and he was sitting in the smoke, chewing and coughing and looking at her. Without his plate, in only his filthy clothes, he wasn't much smaller, and that made her afraid again. He motioned and she walked over to the fire and sat huddled in her cloak. He eyed her. "Didn't run. Didn't think you would." He looked up at the treetops and she did too, to the cobalt sky above the clearing. "How do you like your new cage, little bird? Good deal bigger." He rose, sawed at the spit, and handed over a stringy thigh.

It wasn't all that pleasant, what with the dryness, but it was hot. They ate in silence together, the big man clearing his throat, she chewing and watching the fire. The weight of where she was landed heavy on her as she finished eating, and she felt a sudden desperation for comfort. There was none, and there wouldn't be, she realized, so she spoke to the man as a sorry consolation.

"Why did you go? Did someone tell you to take me?"

The Hound's eyes widened in the firelight, and he gave an echo of the laugh he'd had in her room.

"If they had, would you like this better?" She stared at him. "No, girl, I ran away, and I stole you, too. Do you picture Dontos' ship, circling the harbor? I bet that you do."

She started to cry, silently. He frowned at her. "Think you're the only one that's lost their home? I've nothing at all. You think I have a place in the North, people waiting? Stop crying." And she did, looking at his face and seeing the regret there, clear and bright and bitter. _He's sorry he left. He's sorry he has me along_. The regret twanged a chord of fear inside her. _He was drunk when he took me; he wants to leave me now_. The cold she felt when she looked at the man was nothing compared to the cold that filled her at the thought of waking up in the wood, to no one. Sansa wiped her face, composed herself, made herself look at him. There was a spray of dried blood up his left wrist. _The hare._ He was looking at the fire, not her, and his face was wretched. She forced herself to talk, to distract him from the regret.

"Why did you leave? You didn't say."

The firelight was dying and she could see the jut of his underlip, magnified by the shadow, as his frown deepened. "I ran away from the fire. You know why." She nodded, and he breathed, fixed his gaze on her, leaned back. "I don't know that you could smell it, in your room. But you did, at the stable. That smell, it was a hundred thousand men, burning. And those burning men?" He leaned forward. "They were running. They were running, on fire, all of them. It wasn't a battlefield, it wasn't– You wouldn't know. The water was on fire, everything–" She saw a sudden bright sheen on the good side of his throat, sweat caught in the stubble. "They were running at me. My own men. They didn't know me. They were all on fire. I fought and then I couldn't fight anymore and I left."

They sat in silence for a moment. "I got the horse and I drank. Packed the horse. My things, and a few things I'd been owed. Also," he paused, and the shadow of the uneven smile returned, "took away a few things, what I thought valuable."

He watched her fists curl and laughed. "Easy, it's the truth. I was going North anyway."

"Valuable? To sell?" Her voice was wavering again.

"Valuable of itself, and yes, valuable things are sold." He was laughing silently at her now, his grin wide and crooked from the scar.

"Why didn't you take Joff, then? If you were– If you…" Anger was closing her throat tight.

The man leaned back again, rested on his palms, and regarded her. "I suppose you're fit to judge the worth of the new king as any. Tell me, do you find him to have particular value?" He watched her hackles rise, then gave a diffident nod. "Much the same as I thought." To her surprise, a short burst of laughter came from her, and she put her hand over her mouth.

The man rose, stiffly, and kicked loam over the dying fire. She saw the embers swirl bright over his boot, and then it was blue-dark. She heard, rather than saw, him crackling through the brush, heard him talking to the horse in his tired voice. She toed her way to her pallet in the glowing blue. It was cold and smelled of sweat, and she felt movement scurry from under it as she crawled into it, but her legs were floating from exhaustion. A short while passed. She heard the crackle as he returned, and the clinking as he lay, but she was asleep before she could hear his slow breathing in the dark.


	6. Chapter 6

He woke her at first light.

She had heard him start packing the horse through her sleep, and the horse tossed, irritated, and so her dreams had been filled with Robb in the stable, Robb making her ride and she protesting; Robb laughing and swatting at her in the great vaunted stables of their home. When the rough hand closed around her wrist she woke smiling, still at Robb, and then her eyes cleared.

The man in the pale light smiled back. Their smiles faded together. He said, "Yes," softly, to the disquiet in her eyes, and gripped the wrist harder to pull her to her feet.

She went out in the woods as far as she could bear and squatted, her dignity sore. When she came back she ate bread from her bag and watched him finish packing. He had an economy of motion that reminded her of her father, which both comforted and upset her. When the horse was packed he turned and picked her up and sat her on the giant thing without hardly looking at her, but she could see that his regret had largely passed. He was busy; he was planning the route.

They rode, steady, the Hound's breath warm on the cold crown of her head, and the wood passed by in jolting grey-green beauty. Early morning cackling birds, pockets of fog above small creeks, hares bounding from the brush with their ears back flat. The horse stopped occasionally of its own accord to drink, and sometimes just to stop, and blow. The Hound was silent and she was grateful for it, lost in the sea of thoughts of her home, her mother, and what she would say.

It was afternoon when they passed a thin man standing perfectly still in the shallow of a creek, holding a sharpened pole. Sansa was reminded of a quail she'd almost stepped on once, down by their old woodpile–it had been so still, hiding in plain sight–this man had the same drab brown plumage and the same rigid terror. He was looking at the Hound. She looked at the man. _Does he live here? How can one do that?_ And they passed slowly by. The Hound patted her arm, a single pat, and said nothing.

They rode and rode, endless jolting, and as the sun was waning she was very sore, and felt at odds with the horse and with trying to keep herself from the chest behind her. She shifted, and shifted again. He moved forward, and she felt his hair brush her neck. He was looking down at her. "Lean," he said, a clipped command, and she stayed still. Then his arm, flat and broad as an oar, came around her ribs and pulled her back. "Lean. Go on." So she did, and fell into his rhythm. It was easier and it was warmer and she dozed against the oar.

As the sun set, she found that she and her companion had begun a routine. They slowed at a clearing and he set her down. The horse, brushed; the man, off in the wood crackling around and back with two hares dangling limp from his left hand. He cleaned them and set the spit, set the small fire, stretched, yawned, scratched his chest by the fire. The horse grazed behind them, a soft constant sound. And again she found herself before the fire, finished with eating and looking across at the Hound. He was sharpening, quick little rasp-rasps, the blade across his thigh. The part of her that was not afraid of him, that knew him, found it easier to speak to him in the dark.

"When you left. Joff would never have let you go. Did he know?"

He came back from wherever he was and focused on her. "He does now."

She squinted at him. "You just left? I think– he'll be so angry, though."

He regarded her steadily, his eyes all black in the low light. "I left, no matter. I would again." She didn't know what to say. There was silence, and she brushed through the ground's light loam with a knuckle.

"No one told me what he is, and he looked, well, he looked so–" She upturned a hand, not caring to admit how she'd found his looks to be, and the Hound leaned forward, grinning his crooked grin.

"You're wrong, he is what he looks. He looks a king and a king he is, bird, inside and out. What did you think a king is?"

She shook her head. "Everything was like a dream, and then…" Her voice trailed away, and his grin spread. "A dream? Your whole life is a dream. Took a bastard and Ilyn Payne himself to wake you. Not sure even that did the trick."

_Bastard. He would tell the truth, if anyone would_. "Do you mean that it's true?"

"What your father said. What the Hand before him said. They died for it. You doubt them now?"

"How are you sure?"

He shrugged, bent back down to his work. "I've half my life in their name, more than half. Came there from Gregor, younger than you; now I'm twenty-eight. When Joff was born, the Kingslayer was–" He described a circular motion in the air, "wild, I don't know, like he was in a frozen lake, on the wrong side. Cersei was pleased as a cat in the cream. She _will_ gamble. And Joff, all gold. I remember, but I didn't see it, then. But the boy grew, and I took him over, as I was bid." He frowned down at the sword. The dark filled in the hollows of his eyes and jaw, made him look like a skull with lank hair. "Then, I saw. Robert's? He'd be bigger, and simpler, and other things, besides. Dark, like Robert. Rough." She stared at him, remembering the king's red face, Joff's ivory-gloss cheekbones. "And–But then, you didn't know Jaime. He's kind of reckless, a careless kind. Joff reeks of it. You well know that much." He smirked up at her. "Also, I'd been Cersei's guard, before. Easy enough to let your own guard down around your dog, and she did."

Sansa breathed. "But if you knew, then you knew he was never the prince."

He shrugged again. The minute rasp of his stone carried over the fire to her and his voice, husky like the stone, came along with it. There was wryness in it. "Tell me it isn't just. That court, tripping on its honor, with a cuckold and a drunk for a king. Those two yellow-headed fuckers–" Sansa couldn't bear his drooping grin, "that buggering dwarf, the Kingsguard. And, finally," He swiveled the sword to point at her from its rest on his knee, "a bastard, next on the throne."

_He's telling the truth_. "How could you let them? And just follow Joff, do anything he told you…"

"No, that's wrong. I didn't do everything he bid. What it was, he would only ask for what he knew I'd do." The smile grew, stretched his burnt lip to white. She remembered Arya's butcher's boy again. _It's not the scar itself that is so bad, it's the scar behind the scar. I could have run, yesterday. What have I done?_ "Did you care for him at all?"

The smile fell. "Hate him as you will, little bird, but understand that he'd not much chance. His life was set for him when his mother chose her brother's bed. Bad enough, that, but they were together in the womb, even." He shook his head at his work. "Kingslayer knew the cost; he'd put Aerys down for madness, and it's clear how that madness came to be." The Hound looked up at her, and his voice was very low. "Wonder if he can bear to do the same when the new king's too sick to rule."

She shuddered and didn't want to look at him anymore. She looked at his boots instead, crossed over each other in the ashes. He stirred, gestured to her with his stone. "He was already gone wrong, far before you. Far before. He grew, and–well. He did things, every once in a while. Cersei hid them as best she could, but Robert found out. It was a shock to Robert; he's a simple man and he took it poor." The Hound shrugged slightly, as if to himself. "They gave him to me. I could handle the boy. I know that kind."

Sansa looked at his slick black scar, and felt a wave of understanding. _Oh, but you do, don't you_? She marveled for a moment at this glimpse of the Queen's mind. If she'd been the man, instead of the Kingslayer–_it must haunt her, that throne. She did what she could to put herself on it, in Joff. To be_ _a mother to that, and yet love him so._ She spoke without thinking. "I thought to kill him, once."

He laughed. "You did, at that. And you would've. Both of you. Didn't think on it at all, I saw you. What a thing to your mother, her children falling from the sky like shot crows." She looked away from him, tilting her face upwards, and he let her blink til she regained her composure. "You'd not be the one to kill the king. It's beyond you, or I; it's theirs now. They'll fight it down to the end. Whoever's claw is sticking up from the mud's the winner, and they win what prize? A seat of knives, worn smooth by dead men." He gazed at her, the lines at the sides of his mouth dark in the shadow. "I'll take the wood, and gladly."

_Is it so beyond me?_ "I am a Stark, of Winterfell."

"Pleased to hear that you recall, I'd thought you'd said you were the daughter of a traitor." Sansa felt her hands sweating, and relaxed their fists. "Stark or not, you're a woman. You'll not sit the throne. Not even Cersei could, for all her grasping."

"I think she sits it, some of the time."

The Hound dropped his head back and laughed. "I'll bet she does. When everyone's asleep." He was spluttering. When he came back, his grin was genuine. "No, little bird, you're right. She does, in her way. For what it's worth. Blackwater showed it weren't worth much." _She left us when they lost. _He settled back, still grinning, and brought his legs out to the fire. She stared for a while at the worn soles of his boots, then at her own. They were quiet for a while, him rasping, her tracing through the loam at her feet. A piece of bark all laced with worm tunnels almost looked covered in script in the soft light. She picked it up. It was beautiful, like a tiny maze. She turned it over, then, and saw that the rough backside was dotted with colorless spiders, and dropped it with a gasp. _Everything in the wood has a bug on it, or is rotten on the underside_. She thought of King's Landing, suddenly, and grimaced. _Not just the in the wood, maybe. Maybe most places._

Her thoughts went to the Lannisters. She remembered Joffrey as she'd first seen him, his hair bright gold in the weak sun. His crisp jaw, the way he'd eyed her as he'd walked beside her, a lovely green glint shining at her for a moment. How her chest had _burned_ at that slanted look. She thought of him, then of Cersei and the Kingslayer, together. It was a long time before she was aware that the Hound's rasping had stopped, and she looked over the fire at him. His arms and ankles were crossed, and his chin was on his chest. The sword had dropped, the pommel lying across his thigh. _I could stand up and leave right now_, she thought idly, _just like falling off a walk with Joff's arm in my hand. I couldn't take Joff with me now, but I could take whatever I am_. She sighed, and brought her knees to her chest.

The man across from her was still frightening, even crumpled in sleep. His face had slackened but the puckered scar had still not smoothed, and the light moving over it made him seem awake. _My age more than twice over. Where will I be, when I'm his age?_ Sansa thought of Ser Dontos for a moment, and realized with a pang who she would've chosen, had she been given a choice. She watched the firelight on his face and thought of the story he'd told her, back there in the dark, on the way to her room. She'd promised never to tell, and she wouldn't; he'd handed over his dignity with that story, and he'd not meant to tell it at all, she was sure. She frowned at the sleeping man. _He'll sell me, of course, but who shan't? My own father sold me to Robert, but it was Joffrey who paid him._ The thought was blasphemous; she shut her eyes and kept them shut, and put her head against her knee. For a while she dreamt of her father, but it was the Hound's warm hand on her wrist that woke her, and after she'd stumbled over to her pallet, she didn't dream at all.


	7. Chapter 7

It was dawn and she was sitting on a log, eating her bread and rubbing her eyes, and talking to the Hound. He'd patted her to wake her, and she'd woken slow and drowsy, curling in her pallet, listening to him mumbling to himself as he cleared their camp. When he was finished it was if they'd never been there, and she wondered if he did it from habit or from prudence. She herself felt so lost, but still they could be followed; he was such a big man, to try to hide. She stilled herself by remembering the only other man she'd seen, the thin fisherman, and how he'd stood transfixed with fear as they rode by.

The morning was pale blue and so clear. That old feeling from her childhood of waking early, before the others, and creeping puffy-eyed to the kitchen to pilfer came to her, and it pleased her. The Hound was talking to both her and the horse equally, admonishing the horse and telling her of the byroutes he planned to take, all names she'd never heard. She watched him as he packed, lazy on her log. "You have no worry out here, do you?" The question brought his head around. His hair was roughed with sleep and dirt.

"In this wood? No. The few men here–" he waved a hand, "hunters, walking men. Poor men of the woods; they're as timid as the deer, and they want none of me. And the ones that's fleeing the war, they're just little men carrying bog-iron axes. I'm five of them, easy, and they all know it. What's to fear?" His voice was the same as what he used on the horse when he packed it, the cadence rolling.

"I've never been out in the wood like this. There's wolves and bears."

"They shy away when they smell us. And they don't like the fire. Neither do I, if it comes to that. But it's only two-legged lions you should worry over, and we left them in King's Landing. They'd not come through this wood to hunt you; they'll stay the Road, as they'd expect we'd do."

"Should we be caught already, if we'd taken the Road?"

"I'd think, most like; we'd stand out like whores in a sept. I can't hide my face, and if I could, I'd still be heads taller than those miserable shits. There's the horse," he slapped at its neck, absently, and it knocked his brow hard with its muzzle, "and I have no plans of switching this horse. And with you, red hair and all. You'll have to cover it when we get closer, I can hear the ransom coins clinking all the way up here. So, we'll be some time in the wood, and it may be long. You'll have to stay patient. I intend we both live."

"But we are going North?"

"Getting colder, isn't it? Stop asking me that." The rebuke was mild; he was frowning at a knot. _It is getting colder_, she thought, _it's lovely_. He gave up the knot and turned to pick her up, and she finished her bread on the horse.

They rode most of the day, and after time, they talked. She told him of her mother and her home and he let her ramble, and listened. He talked, desultorily, of King's Landing, and then of Robert. He gave his opinion on Stannis–moderate, a faint tinge of respect–and on Renly–didn't fare as well, Sansa could feel his voice in his chest deepen with disapproval as well as hear it; but when he leaned forward to her ear and expounded on Ser Loras, she objected, and he laughed.

It was midafternoon when they passed a small turf cottage, all sunk and crumpled into the loam, its thatch almost dragging the ground towards the back. It was set away, dark, and a small fence with briar net was beside it. The door was standing open and lying in the way was a wooden cup on its side. The Hound stilled the horse and stared.

"Probably empty, all picked through already. Can't be anything left what with the door open like that." His voice was a murmur, and he shifted. They waited a moment, Sansa and the horse, while he considered, and then he dismounted. She watched him approach it, slow and cautious, and she thought of the horse underneath her with true fear for the first time. _If he didn't come out, I would be here on this horse, alone._ She brought her eyes back to the Hound and kept them there, stared at his hand high on the sill. He had to duck deeply to pass the slanted doorway.

He came out quickly, his hands at his sides, palms open, the sword sheathed. He mounted quick behind her and spurred the horse, and the relief was so great that it was minutes later til she asked.

"It was empty? Just empty, I wonder why they left. I wouldn't have left if it was mine, it's probably the only house for–"

"They were in there. They were all sick, in there."

"Sick?" She looked up and back at his jaw, saw his eye slide down to meet hers.

"Yes, sick. Food on the table and everything, all black. Babe in a cot, black too." He breathed against her crown. "Happens from bad air; bad air that came from underground, that's what they say. We'll not stop this next town, we'll go round it and stay in the wood." She nodded against him, and realized she could feel his pulse fast against her shoulders. It was a long time before they spoke again.

The sun was almost set and the wood had changed faintly, it was denser and the trees were velvet with moss. The horse's step was muffled some. They passed through a small break in the wood and he pulled the horse to a stop, set her down and stretched, ribs popping loud, and unpacked. Sansa sat and sifted through her bag and pulled out her cloak, a new dress–_grey dress, I wish he'd brought the blue one, it's so much better, I wonder who has it now_–went away into the wood for a while and came back, saw the fire empty of spit and realized she was not hungry, but ravenous. She stood and looked at the Hound and he looked back, blank, sitting by the fire.

"Are you going to–Is there anything to eat?" When he grinned, she felt herself flush, and heard her question again in her ears, the childishness of it. She looked down.

"It's too dark for the bow and I've had enough of rabbit. You don't seem to be providing much, either." She looked back up, burning, and he motioned for her to sit. She settled the grey dress under her and watched him dig through the sack he'd dragged over to his feet. He pulled out a lump covered in cloth and muttered, "Courtesy of the kitchens of the King," and then they ate, to her delight, salt pork and hard cheese.

After they ate she was comfortable, and warm in her heavy dress, and the fire had a sweet moss smell that was familiar to her. The man was brooding. She had noticed he had a habit, while in thought, of tracing along the ridge of scar at his jawline with his thumb; he was doing it now. _I wonder if he can feel that_. She looked at the scar. _It's easier to look at him, I suppose because I'd rather have him here than not_. He felt her watching him and cleared his throat, looked across at her.

"I didn't like seeing them sick in that hut. Things have changed since I was on the way North last, with Robert." He gestured around. "It's the war, of course. The towns'll be rough, I don't regret our taking the deep wood. Whole way will be thick with war, and what war brings." He sighed and rose. "Go to bed now, the Blackwater's caught up with me and I want to sleep." He stepped on the fire, and it was dark, darker than the night before.

She shook out her bedroll first before she lay in it; she was learning. She pulled the acrid blanket to her chin, listened, and heard him settling down across the way, and then heard his breathing turn ragged with deep sleep. She fell asleep herself to the sound, and it seemed to keep its slow rhythm through her dreams.

And so it was a shock when she woke, only a few hours later, to the outline of him against the sky, crouching over her.


	8. Chapter 8

It had been the smell that saved her.

She herself would never know what had done it, but in truth it was the smell, and the hidden part of her mind that was animal. He was crouching over her, breathing, his hand on her shoulder. She blinked in the dark and mewled, protesting. It was early, far too early to ride, he must know that, she was finally warm and she was still asleep. He ran his hand down along her anyway, rough, stroking over her hip, clenching, and then his other hand pulled down her blanket from her throat. His knuckles where rough on her throat, ran along her collarbone, one knuckle dragging against her breastbone and down. His knee was against her, now his other; he was straddling her. She moved to bat him away, and he caught her hand in his firm grip and now the blanket was sliding off, pushed down to her skirts, and he was lifting her against him, bringing her to his chest. He was picking her up.

It was then that she opened her mouth against his throat to object–_I don't want to sleep on the horse, I'm not ready, let go_–and she breathed in deep for her complaint, and when she did she smelled him.

It wasn't the familiar, heavy salt-musk smell of him, it had changed: tangy with an undercurrent of sharp, like urine. Before she could think on it her free hand had flown to his face and palmed it and instead of a plate of scar there was dense bristle to tell her, and because of this, only because of this, she managed a half-second of guttural cry before the hand curled hard over her mouth and smothered it.

He had picked her up, now, and she couldn't make a sound, couldn't breathe, the hand was over her mouth and nose. She saw the outline of the head against the blue, he was lifting her to her feet. His hand behind her was grabbing, kneading, grinding her against him; and then it slacked and his head bobbed and knocked hers. He pinched her then, a convulsion, tightened her against his lap, and he gurgled loud, a rattling sound. Then the head–but how was this? It stayed where it was, but she was falling. Oh, he had dropped her. No, his body was still on her, still holding her tight, she hit the ground with him clutching her–he was lying on top of her, but his head, it was still far above her, it was swaying back and forth, he was nodding _no, no_. She was wet suddenly, had she lost her bladder, what was this? The head was spitting on her–_what is this, what?_

She saw the head sway and saw the shadow behind it at once, and knew, and she was inside out in her horror, retching, thrashing under the body. The head dropped then, beside hers, a wet sound like overripe fruit; a cheek sound like when you suck too hard on a honeycomb, and the body leapt off of her, arms flailing.

Then she was pulled up, rough grip, and standing, and the Hound was patting her, patting her, his hands fluttering all over her body, and he was muttering low _where is it, where is it, fuck, where is_ _it? Answer me_, and she realized through her panic that he was looking for a wound, sightless in the dark. And so she said, "I'm not cut," and it was then, hearing her own voice small in the night, that she became as a child again.

She clutched him to her, screeching and sobbing, without dignity, and let him hold her.


	9. Chapter 9

She cried for a time, and when the last few squalls were done he squatted and hoisted both her and her pallet and dumped them over by his own. He groped around in the dark, found her bag, pushed it to her, and she moved behind him to get back into her old dress. The bloodsoaked wool was clammy against her face as she stripped it off, but she was numb. She tossed it away from her into the encircling brush. She breathed shuddering breaths there, for a minute, and then she pushed the panic back. When she sat down beside him, the Hound stirred and spoke.

"You'll sleep beside me now, it'll not happen again. What I said earlier by the fire– all of that, I'd told you, and I'd known." She felt him shift, turn to her. "In the morning when I wake you, you'll look at him. I know you'd thought I'd drag him off, but I won't, and you'll look at him in the light." He cut off her sound of protest. "You want to add him to your list of terrors? You have a long list, girl, I've been there for all of them. Look at him in the light and you'll see him for the shit he is." He snorted to himself. "Was." He took a deep breath. "Go to sleep."

She couldn't speak, or hardly listen to him; her head was swirling still with the moment she had put her palm against the stranger's face and known. She felt a great injustice had been done her, starting as a child and culminating in that clutching hold of the stranger. How was it, how could it be, that she had been taught such a careful set of rules, such a careful way of things, when all around her the teachers had known the truth: that the rules were like the gilt on the dented breastplate of the man she'd trod over, no defense at all. A sad glint left on a battlefield, a charming idea that had occurred before the great wave of black riders swarmed over it. She was unarmoured in the wake of those black riders, in the wake of all the roiling world outside the walls of her home.

Intense disillusionment tasted much like bile; perhaps it was. Sansa swallowed twice and turned to the man beside her. She wanted her mother, she wanted to be carried, she wanted, with desperation, her father. It was cold, the knowledge that all she had was this man beside her, and his well of rage. She said it then in her heart and felt the truth of it, and was too angry to look away from it. _I've nowhere else to go_.

He was lying on his side beside her, facing away from her, angry as well. She could feel it as she often had before. Most likely at her; she didn't care. She wasn't the black world that had crawled through the brush to take her, that was the rest of it, everything else. If he was angry with her, then he was angry with the wrong one. She laid back on her pallet, her fists under her chin.

It was then, at that moment, that she made the leap in her mind, unbidden, and lost another layer of her childishness. The Hound, who had once come to her room in the dark, was himself a black rider, himself a thing in the night, crawling. It was too large to put her thoughts to. She let herself wander away from it, let herself relax, but it came back. It sung, it hummed; it couldn't be ignored, and she lay very still for some time. Then, unbeknownst to her, the cold scales that were her mother's greatest gift to her rose up in her mind and took it over, performed their silent calculation. She felt something, a curious finality, and without meaning to she chose.

When it happened, she thought it weakness, but she was wrong. Later in her life she would name it instinct, and still be wrong.

She chose, and turned, and leaned until her back rested against his.

It was hard but warm, and the great bellows that were his lungs and ribs rocked her slightly. She could feel the heavy double thump of his heartbeat, far slower than hers, and so loud.

Once, at home, they'd butchered an old bull, and the kennelmaster had taken the bull's heart. The boys had clamored to watch the dogs be fed. She'd not watched, but she'd seen the heart as it was being carried away, brown with clotted blood, an enormous, knotted thing. So big the kennelmaster had needed both hands to carry it. _That must be what his heart is like_, she thought, _how terrible_. But still the bellows rocked her, and much later, without knowing it, she fell asleep.

In the morning he woke her late and told her not to eat, and did as he'd said he would. A crow flew cackling from the body as they walked over to it in the bush, and Sansa looked at it in the light of day.

The thing on the ground that had been so strong, so grasping, was just a pile of rags. A memory flashed to her of their little stable dog, trampled by her mother's pregnant mare and later found by Jory. The children had all cried, burying it. The ruffled ribs had been the worst, flat like a paper doll. _That is how a body looks without a head; flat_. She knew already, in a way, because of her father, but that had been her father, who was never fully a body, even in death. This was a stranger. She looked closer. He'd been a big man but lean, very lean, much older than the Hound. The clothes were muddy, the boots mismatched, one black and the other, brown and bigger. There were scabs on the arms and hands. She felt the Hound watching her, and she looked up. He was standing next to the head and he knocked it with his boot til it spun on its temple to face her.

It was dreadful, dark red and grizzled with its red mouth wide open, eyes starting from their sockets all blotched like quail's eggs. A dreadful, leaky thing, disgusting in the morning light, but somehow there was a small thread of triumph inside her disgust, a small thread of satisfaction. _It's fair. He got what's fair._ She remembered suddenly her night's revelation and looked up guiltily at the Hound. He misread her look for timidity, and it was just as well.

"Second time I've shown you a head, now. You'll think I'm making a job of it." With that, he booted the head away, and she turned as he patted through the pockets. Oddly, that was the part she felt she couldn't bear to see.

She was glad to ride away from there. The great black horse had turned to her when she approached, eyeballs rolling when he'd smelled the blood on her; his nostrils flared and he blew against her neck, excited. Later, they'd passed a small creek in a dell, and the Hound lifted her off the horse and walked off. "Your face," he'd said, over his shoulder. Her throat, too, she could feel it, dried stiff and itchy, and her collarbone, her bust. She thought she wouldn't look, but she did, and for a bright instant she'd seen her face reflected in the clear water before she'd leaned down and washed the blood away.


	10. Chapter 10

A strangeness had fallen between her companion and herself.

She'd felt it on the morning's ride; his breath in her hair was irregular. She watched the bright woods jolt by but the anger rode behind her on the horse, solid and unyielding. When she asked him to stop, his grip setting her down was painful and he held her arm tight in his fist for a moment when she'd come back out of the underbrush. The grip was to punish, not to comfort; her cold scale ticked again, toggled, the balance swaying to and fro.

A small child survives only by dint of its own helplessness: its protectors, seeing the pathetic thing, cannot help but be swayed. As it grows, it learns to exploit what it can of that helplessness until the exploited and the child both become weary with indignities of childhood. She was caught in the first snare of a woman's life, the moment when awareness had pulled away only half the veil. She knew, and didn't; she was both wary and incautious. Childhood rankled her, was no longer fitting; still, she was too young to exploit the ways that life would later bind her protectors to her. The scale ticked and ticked, but her consciousness was unaware of it, and so when she finally leaned back against the man, it was a simple act that was at once calculated and innocent, innocent and cruel.

When they stopped again, it was midday and the wood was beautiful and sharp, sun slanting through the trees, the horse's picking steps trailing a glowing swirl of loamy dust. The deep-woods smell, the sharp alcoholic pine-needle smell was strong now. He dismounted, pulled her down, and walked wordless off into the brush, and so she roamed in aimless widening circles around the horse and waited for him. She found late-summer blackberries in the low briars and ate them crouching in the bramble. When he returned her mouth was stained red and he glanced at her for a narrow-eyed second, set his hand on a tree, high up on the bark.

"If you're in the wood, and you can't tell where you are," patting the bark, "find a tree that's not leaning, that's straight up and down. Look up here. No, not there. Up. See how moss is only on this side?" It was the first he'd spoken; she stared at him. "That side's north, the moss side. Usually." The Hound breathed through his mouth at her, and sat her back on the horse. She fretted as they rode. _Why did he bother with that?_ _Of course I knew that, everyone knows that_. _Does he mean to leave, have me go from tree to tree all the way home_. She felt the unflagging anger behind her as they mounted again, understood dimly that she could not know his mind, and so she dipped into the reserves of her character, and rode silently.

That was when they began to see men in the woods. At first, just a pace in the underbrush stopping short as they picked by; then, glints of metal lit by the setting sun, voices cut and hushed, dissolute camps with the ash still smouldering. An untethered horse, half-packed, standing in a creek. Sansa watched all of this and felt the pressure build.

It happened, finally, as the sun was beginning to set. The tall man behind her had exhaled and slumped against her, his collarbone pressing against the back of her head, brought the horse to its halt. "Here's as good a place as any. Help me unpack." And she did, taking the bags from him, pulling knots apart. He had commanded her attention as he set the spit, built the fire; she watched him as she'd once watched her father show her, so long before. He took up his quiver then as the mossy fire smoked between them, and looked at her, one tooth on his lip, calculating.

"You'll stay by the horse while I'm gone. Don't touch him, just stand by him. No one will come; he is what he is." She nodded, squinting, and he stepped over the fire to squat beside her. The pressure that had been growing all through the long day was at its head. He leaned, held her chin between a dirty thumb and forefinger, and looked closely at her. She looked in kind and waited. The dust in the cracks of his scar, the blue hollows in his jaw, but all over, all in all, it was the well she was looking at.

"What do you think about that man in the night, little bird? What did you learn, did you learn anything at all? Tell me the truth, or I'll tell it to you." But of course she couldn't say. She opened her mouth in the grip, but nothing came out–not_ you, and he and I have ridden together on the black wave, we rode over the bodies of the knights and went into the wood, I am with the black riders now, I have gone away with the black rider_; and so, like any young girl, she said nothing, and she looked away from him. She felt the thick plate of scar scrape against her cheek, he was sliding his cheek against hers to put his words to her ear, then, still holding her, and the words came hot and close. "All you can learn from that is to expect it," and then he was up and walking away with the quiver, out into the wood again.

She went and stood by the horse, and she didn't touch it.


	11. Chapter 11

When he came back it was purple in their camp and the fire, by contrast, was bright. She'd fed it twigs and moss and looked at the dozing horse, and looked at the sky. She thought of Robb and imagined him triumphant, thought of Arya for a while, felt an unnameable guilt. _I wanted a prince and she wanted swords. I hope her swords were sweeter to her than what I've had_. It was then that the Hound returned with his prize, running his hand along the horse's poll as he passed. She had crouched beside the horse, hearing the quiet steps in the brush, she'd felt her heart, but it was just him. He had not hares but a bevy of grey ruffles in his hand; _doves, how sad_, her heart dropping a little. He raised the hand and smiled at her faintly, not a pleasant smile, shaking the ruffles.

"Better for you. You're thinning; I can't bring bones to your mother, can I?" He frowned to himself as he sat and twisted off wings at the edge of the brush. "Pretty thing, your mother, but easy to see what she's thinking; she didn't like me then, she won't like me any better now." She stood in the smoke and watched the soft feathers blow away in the wind. He was pressing his thumbs into the doves then, the breasts sliding out dark red, and the image struck her. It was terrible, but it was a small thing in comparison and she was hungry, very hungry–she walked into the brush and stood with her back to him til he was done. He smirked at her when she came back to the clearing. They waited while the doves were in the ash and she listened to him ramble about Stannis and the dwarf and the war, and what he would've done.

The Hound had settled beside her at the fire. It was cold, and they sat close. He'd started to smell rank, she noticed; strongly, too, of sweat and dirty hair. There were salt rings at the ribs of his tunic, and the old gore at the cuffs had dried stiff. He was kneading apart her birds. He'd wrapped them in wet white bark and baked them in the ashes, and when he opened the bark, a thread of fragrant steam snaked out. He put the doves in their warm bark in her hands. She tasted it, hesitant, and it melted on her tongue, savory and hot. She forgot he was there then and ate frantic, a hungry child, the doves falling apart in her hands and mouth, and he watched her.

"A bird, eating a bird. The world's upside down." He was laughing, and she looked over at him. Not much was left of his own birds, and he had ash on his knuckles and cheek. _I'll feed him a dog, and see if he laughs, then_. She was ashamed of herself. _No, that isn't fair_. She looked closely at him; his bad side faced her. His eyes were grey like her father's, her sister's, but darker, the whites cloudier. Dirt had packed itself in the cracks of his scars, and the opaque sliver of bone showing at his jaw that had once repulsed her now only gave her a strange, solemn feeling, like walking behind the sept through the graveyard of the poor used to do.

An old memory floated back to her. There had been a traveling puppet show that had come when they were all young, before Rickon was born. It had a small castle, perfectly painted, and tiny wooden horses that walked, and fools, and little ladies wearing gowns. Sansa was charmed into speechlessness by it. The puppets moved just like real people, and their mouths opened and closed and they sang songs for coins. Her mother had given her a coin to put into the box, and she'd run up, but when she got close she saw many hands hidden inside the castle, making the men walk. She'd been so surprised when she saw the puppeteers in the courtyard afterward, drinking wine and laughing; they were rough men with red faces, and if their voices hadn't been just like the puppets she would've believed the puppets real. _That's some of why he's angry. He lived in the castle and he saw all the hands_. She thought of how hard he'd laughed when she'd told him of Ser Dontos. _Is that why he took me?_

"Get used to anything if you look enough. Don't mind it much, then?" He squinted sidelong at her, waiting for a lie, chewing. _I've been staring for a long time._

"I did mind, before, but it went away." The bald words came out before she could help herself, and she paled. He turned to look her full in the face, his expression blank. She held his gaze miserably and waited for him to pull from the vast well. It didn't come. He looked for long minutes, then turned back, tossed the bones into the fire, slowly rose and walked off. She heard him in the brush for a while, and then she couldn't hear him anymore.

When he came back she was too shy of him to offer an apology, and he seemed not to need one. He was calm and tired and spoke little, and laid a hand on her shoulder to press it briefly before kicking over the fire and settling down.

It was far later in the night, as she was on her side on her pallet with the cold wind on her, when she finally understood that a kindness had passed between them. How small it was, compared to the great kindnesses she'd once lived on. Like a little mouse, eating its little meal. She opened her eyes and turned, saw the outline of the man asleep beside her in the dark_. Little bitter kindness, but he eats it anyway, and goes to sleep_. She felt a strange emptiness thinking of it, a hollow in her chest; she carried the hollow with her to her dreams, which were dark and are best left undescribed.


	12. Chapter 12

Their clearing sat alongside a wide creek and so along with the early dawn rose a low-lying fog. All noises are sharp in a fog, and seem close; when the Hound stood abruptly from their pallets and withdrew his sword from its sheath the bright hask brought her awake and upright, clutching her blanket to her chest.

In the mist was a small man digging through the ashes of their fire. He stood rigid at the sound of the sword, caught where he was, openmouthed. Her vision sharpened and she saw that it was only a raggy boy about her age, wearing a rucked pair of man's breeches tied up at the ankles, dirty hair, thin brown wrists still in the ash. The Hound dropped his point and leaned on it. He and the boy stared at each other a long moment, and Sansa watched as the boy's shoulders began to shake under his rags. _A monster, he must think_. Then the Hound waved slightly as if to call off a dog, and the boy burst and ran, skidding clumsy through the brush.

The Hound sat down beside her, yawning and scratching, but her heart was still in her throat.

"What was he doing in the fire?" The grey eyes turned to her, the whites all red with sleep. "I doubt he knows. Looking for anything he could find. Probably thought there'd be scraps left. More than not, he'd been watching us through the night."

She thought on this. Watching us. "Where are the rest of his people?"

"They're dead, most like. I told you what I saw in that hut. War brings the sickness out of the ground, people stir it up trying to flee. Or else the war itself took them. The next town may be better, we'll see." He stretched back out. "It's early; lie down."

She did, but her sleep was uneasy. The boy crowded her dreams and became Jon at home, digging through the ashes of their kitchen fire. She walked in to see him crying, looking at her, his digging hand all burnt, his face accusatory. Perhaps that was the reason why, after she woke and helped pack and they were leaving their clearing, she took a roll of bread from her bag and left it on the ground by the ashes for the boy. The Hound didn't notice and she was glad of it; it was childish, superstitious thing, if kind. Kind, too, were the morning birds; they waited patiently in the brush til the girl had ridden away, before descending in a mass on the ashy bread and tearing it amongst themselves.

They had ridden half the morning and the fog had not lifted. It was dense now and Sansa's hair netted in droplets; the air became close and the man behind her sighed and squinted at the sky. He nicked to the horse and it turned in an irritated wheel, started back down the ridge.

"What is it? What happened?" She looked up to then chin above her, saw it set.

"It's going to rain. Smell it." She did, then, the sweet heavy smell. "There was an overhang, back there. I don't want the mail getting wet; the Blackwater did enough to it. It's good mail." He brought the horse to a trot as the first drops started. By the time the mossed overhang came to view, their bags were damp and her hair a wet tangle. It was wild and laced with roots under the overhang, and she didn't care to look into its depths, but the plate of stone they sat on was dry. He spread the mail out and she spread out her hair and they watched the sheets of rain flow down the ridge. The horse stood under a tree and snorted incessantly in its rage, and for a while all there was for them was the rain.

The Hound broke from his reverie and went muttering through a wet bag, pulled out a ball of thin rope, dropped it to her lap. "You'll need a net, and you'll make it. You've made lace in your little cage before. Now, I'll have you make lace." He laughed at his own joke and nudged her; she unrolled a length of the rope and looked at him, questioning. "Here." She dropped the length in his hand and he picked at it, began tying the knot, to show her. She leaned close to watch. His hands were covered in so many shallow scars they seemed fishscaled in the grey light.

"Here. Like this. Bend this, and then around this part. Now like so... And pull. That's all. Now you do it." He unwound it just as quick and held it out to her. As he did, a flea crawled from the notch of his shirt and made the small jump to her collarbone. He eyed the flea, licked the broad pad of his thumb and leaned in, pressed it to her; her twitch of disgust only made him cough a laugh. When he pulled his thumb back the flea came with. He rolled it to a smear, laughing raspy, his good eye crinkling and the scar under his bad eye pleating somewhat. She opened her mouth for complaint, but he held up his hand. "Ah, don't start; you'll cry to your mother soon enough about your dog's fleas. I don't want to hear it now." She found herself laughing; she made her clumsy net and watched the rain and tried to comb out her hair with her fingers, and the man put his arm over his eyes and slept. After some time the rain lifted and they began again.

The wood was wet and glittering. They made their way back up the ridge picking slow through the mud, and Sansa, cold in her damp dress, leaned against the man. She thought of the raggy boy again and shivered. How sad, to dig through ashes for your dinner; how sad to lose all of your people. She thought of Jon in the ash of her dream and wondered if her half-brother had heard of the death of the man who was his link to the Starks. The death was a grievous wrong, an imbalance in the world; she felt her anger inside her and wondered then how much of it she could hold. Her thoughts were brought up sharp by the pinch at her side and the Hound leaning to mutter _look, girl_, soft in her ear. She followed his point with her eyes and saw riders only twenty paces to their side, half-hidden by brush, picking through the wet wood just the same.

It was a woman and an old man, each astride an overpacked horse, both faces filthy, stony. She looked at the woman, looked as well as she could into her eyes, wondered what the Hound had meant, and then she saw. The woman– wan, thin; greyish pallor set off by her grey dress. Grey dress which was also Sansa's, which had been spattered in blood and still bore faint stains; grey dress which she had thrown away into the brush the night the stranger had come for her. Grey dress, grey dress– pretty grey dress that the thin woman had found when she went looking through the wood for him, for the man that had never come home in the morning. Sansa's eyes burned with horror and with pity.

Maturity is a callous thing. It drops itself into laps, laughing, careless of the mess; takes the child away, and leaves a changeling.


	13. Chapter 13

The Hound spurred the great horse away up the ridge, and their late afternoon was without incident. As the sun dropped, a cool wind rose up from the creek; the bank flattened and became wide, mossed. After the horse had been tethered on the bank and they had sat and eaten the rest of the hard cheese, he had bid her follow him into the wood.

It was that time of the early evening when the wood is awake again with all things– birds gusting in waves; every thicket besieged with a small war. The man stepped quiet through the wood, scanning, waiting while she untangled skirts, and finally stopped before an outcropping of dirt and root that held a warren-hole at its foot. He took the net she'd made from his hip and nodded to her for her attention, stooped to rub the net in the loam at his feet. He'd strung rope through the edges until it was as an onion bag; to the rope he'd tied a peg of branch, one end whittled sharp. She watched as he pressed the peg in beside the burrow and spread the net around the edges of the hole, dropping twigs over those edges to hold the net secure. Then he rose and dusted his hands, touched her shoulder and led her back through the wood to the bank of the creek.

"Easier when you've something to chase them out, but time'll have to do it." He smiled at her. "I'll set the spit. Get kindling, now, away from the bank, nothing green." She did, and as she gathered she looked at her hands. They were dirty and there was dirt far up under the quick of her nails. It smacked of commonness; she stopped and dug it out with a broken twig, wincing. When she came back with her bundle the spit was there and he was eying her.

"Do you remember where we left your net?"

"Yes, why? What happened?"

"Go and look after it. If it's full, bring it. If it's empty, be quiet and let it be." She looked at him but could find no retort, and walked to the burrow, following along the break in the brush her skirts had left. The wood was purple now and beautiful, beautiful, easy to look at and forget all else; she knew what was coming and hoped against it.

And then, of course, was the net drawn tight like a fist around a small struggling thing, peg holding it fast to the ground. She remembered how he'd laughed to himself when he'd shown her the knot. "Now I'll have you make lace," he'd said, laughing; she hadn't understood, then. _Make lace. Make lace a weapon._ She looked at the caught thing, its black-bead eye shining wide at her.

It was so easy to lift the net loose, watch the thing struggle out, watch it bound panicking back into its warren. She felt simultaneously her hunger and her relief. The rabbit, her hunger, the stranger in the night, his thin wife. No answer seemed correct; every answer had its own injustice. The rules of her courtesy had proven unequal to the game, but she had none to replace them. It was if she had forgotten her name and none had stepped up to present itself as the new one. She looked at the net until some sound made her turn and look into the brush behind her; there was the Hound, watching her, his face molten with disdain. His displeasure had not meant much to her in theory, when she'd turned over the net. With him standing there before her, it was, for some reason, crushing. He gazed at her.

"Poor bird. Is the world ugly, is it not as you'd thought? You'd fall back to your songs, then. But don't forget. I'm here. You can keep the songs. I'll be the ugly." His rasp was soft, but only with derision. He motioned to the net. "Glad I taught you, for the good it did." She was tired, couldn't keep from crying, not with his face, not with the wave of anger that was clenching her throat. The injustice of it all.

"That's how you fight? You weep? That's what you have?" He came closer, squatted down ten paces from her, tapped his knuckles to the ground. He was smiling his lopsided smile at her. "Fine weapon, tears. And your only one, too. Best you drink a lot of water; life's hard." Sudden rage disoriented her, took away her will to keep his eye. She could feel red creeping up her face.

"I'm a lady. I don't–" Her voice sounded garbled and too loud in the quiet wood, the words off, the words childish. He was silent, and the silence dragged on and on. Her tears slowed, but blood rushed in her ears. When she looked up again he was still squatting there, his eyes narrow, his burnt-mask face unreadable.

"A lady, then. Little lady, alone in the wood, watching your supper run away. Starks must think they can eat dignity. Let me warn you, your father lost his taste for it when he lost–"

She flew at him, squalling, and him laughing delightedly. Her clawing nails scrabbled, skittered over his glass-hard burnt cheek and fell into his laughing mouth. He gripped her shoulders and held her away from him at arm's length, and still she clawed the air in front of his face.

"That's right. That's how you fight it, isn't it?" His voice was soft again, but the mockery gone. Her hands dropped. She sobbed in his grip, her face a wash of mucus. He was staring at her, intent, his expression unfamiliar. Bright red streaks had sprung up across his good cheek and down to his throat.

"Do you want to die hungry in the wood? Is that how your pretty song ends? Doesn't seem fair after it all, does it?"

"No," she sobbed.

"Are you going to let it go again?" It was almost placatory.

"No. I won't. No." She breathed in, deep. _I hate you. I'm losing my name more each day_. He held her shoulders and drew her to him, slowly, until she was against his chest and could feel his slow heartbeat. That was too similar to her father, too similar to the princes in the stories of her childhood; she pushed him away. "I hate you. I hate you so much."

He threw back his head and laughed. The hands gripping her shoulders squeezed and then relaxed, then fell away. He was smiling, a hideous thing in the clear light. "Hate me all you care to, little bird. Hate me all through your dinner." He rose, dusted himself, and walked back out into the wood, smiling.

She did hate him, in fact, all through dinner. Through the fire he made, through the hour he was away in the brush where she stood by the horse and gritted her teeth, through the cleaning of the handful of rabbit he'd walked back with, and through the long while of silence that followed as he cooked and hummed and spat, and then handed over her smoldering portion. She thought of the bead but she ate anyway, as she had a hundred times before. She thought of Robb, the children's hunt coming back from the wood, her father smiling with his hand on Robb's shoulder and the doe bouncing limp, head hanging off the cart with black blood draining from its nostrils. She'd eaten that with great pride, hadn't she; hadn't all the children listened with gravity as Robb had recounted it to the men, hadn't the men nodded their approval and clapped her father on the back? Hadn't she eaten a thousand meals and never paid for one of them, never watched the bead widen in its terror; hadn't her long summer treated her well?

Then as the night stretched out and covered over their camp, she felt the hate ebb away, and felt betrayed that it should pass so quickly. It was replaced with a coldness. She hadn't looked at him for hours; she looked over the fire at him now. He was sitting crosslegged, his hauberk on his lap, scraping away the new rust; his tooth was on his lip in concentration. _Looks like a dog, even_. He felt her eye and looked up, frowning.

"It's rude to stare." The curtness, the mockery in his voice wasn't cruel, as it had been earlier, but it was still there. _Perhaps that's the only way he can_. She frowned back at him.

"Why did you want me to do that?"

"Nothing in the wood will come to you, girl." He nicked himself and, scowling, set the tooth again.

"But it's not something I would do." _How does he not understand? I have a role._

"You'll learn what hunger'll have you do. Seems you ate what I brought anyway; but if you'll have no hares then you'll trap birds, I'll see to it. Better, maybe. If you eat only hare, you're sick after a while, and you die."

"Why, are they poisonous?"

He laughed and squinted at the chain in his lap, ignored her mockery. "Don't think so. Seems it's more that having too much of one thing builds up in you and takes your balance, and that's what makes you sick. I've noticed it with wine, myself." He was laughing. _He's avoiding it._

She picked at her slipper and asked him again, and shook his head.

"Why the net? If I die–ah, and you'd like that, wouldn't you? You'd best know how to live, until you can find someone else." He glanced at her, narrow-eyed in the dark.

"Who else?" she demanded, thoughtlessly, and then averted her eyes from the answer in his blank stare. _Who else?_ The swirling knot of dead men that had held her afloat– her father, her Jory, her father's guard, every one, Ser Dontos, most likely– they had culminated in this man across from her, scraping mail on his lap. She asked again, asked the true question.

"Why? Why did you take me?" She saw the well; she kept on. When he snarled, the fissures in his burnt jaw pleated together like black ribbons; she could see them pleated glossy in the firelight now.

"Why are you showing me all of these things? What do you want me to be?"

His good nostril flared, and he breathed loudly; her small jaw clicked as she set it.

"What did you do when they taught you to lie at King's Landing? You lied and lied. Butcher's boy? And your father, too, your brother, spoke against them, I remember. Learned well. Saved yourself." He bared his teeth, but it was no smile. "That's done and you're in the wood, same pretty lying thing, but lies won't help you now. Soon you'll be home, but your home is not what it was, I can tell you that. Your father's dead, sister's gone away, your brother's a boy at war. Your mother… Ah. I want you to see the world as it is. Start by seeing the wood as it is; start with the fucking net." He ducked his head back down.

The cold scales watched him duck his head to avoid her; it was the cold scales and not the child that asked him again.

"Why did you take me?"

He looked back up, and she saw faintly in the well a weakness, but it was a weakness she was too young to understand. He grimaced, shook his head. When he answered it was from the depth of the well, and it was more to himself than to the changeling across from him. "I took something I shouldn't have." He frowned at the mail. "It's better for you, than the other, at least."

"You put me in a sack, and you tied up my mouth."

He laughed at that, softly, scratching the burned side of his throat. "And I may again. Look at these battle wounds." He pointed to the streaks on his good side. "I'll be all over scar by the end, if you have your way." He had his uneven grin. _He's glad I hurt him_. _Was it to prove he'd won?_ _No, it's something else_. She regarded him steadily. Was it her courtesy that he so disliked? Not that alone, it was the obedience. And yet he wanted her to do as he said. _Maybe he just likes anger. He has enough of it himself, you'd think he'd be full to the top._ She was suddenly tired. The wind was blowing the smoke of their small fire over to her, and her eyes felt raw.

"Go lie down. I need to do this." His head had ducked again, like an owl; he didn't look at her as she rose. She stood, looking down at him. He shook his chain out, eyed it, then one quick look up before setting back to the work. "We'll ride early on the morning." The day had been long; she felt muddled, and the anger had left her empty. She thought on the way he'd looked at her, when he'd held her shoulders. _Pride, or something like it. Not about himself. It was because of me, for me._ _Why, why? I don't want the well_. She picked her way to her pallet. It was colder, and the sharp wind threaded down through the trees. She lay on her back and watched the treetops sway, black against the deep blue. It was clear, the stars brilliant. Night birds called softly to each other. Her eyes closed; she was warming now. Far later in the night he lay on his pallet beside her, and she didn't stir at all.


	14. Chapter 14

Three days passed; three days of riding in the morning and ending in a clearing in the early evening, sometimes near the creek, sometimes in the dense wood.

Sansa had seen, one morning, a stag in rut knocking his antlers against a trunk, velvet hanging in shriveled ribbons from the rack. They'd picked on by it lazily, the Hound had pointed; and she'd been reminded of the tourney, the beribboned swords, the beribboned rack, the same preening, jouncing step. She'd slept against the oar, slept in her pallet, eaten baked fish and hare, thought about her mother, talked to the tall man across the fire each night. The net was not mentioned; she kept it wadded in the bottom of her bag. She'd torn her slipper and sewn it by the fire, had been delighted by a fox running past her through the brush, had been stung by a wasp. One night, the man had rolled in his sleep and his arm had fallen across her shoulders. It was warm but very heavy, too heavy; she'd pushed it off and slept against the bellows instead.

That next morning they'd woken to mist and a low sky, and the Hound, scratching at fleas as he packed, had asked after her bread. She'd none left. Her face was wet with mist. She'd frowned at him, hungry, and he'd shrugged at her, looked at the horse for a minute, and then told her that they'd turn in towards the Road and buy more at an inn. "We've been long enough. We've been hunted for all along there, but some time ago. By the time the word is back we'll be far back again in the wood." She'd shivered a little, and he'd laughed, bared his teeth at her. She'd bared hers back; he'd laughed again, louder, scratching, smacked the flank of the horse soundly. And so, agreeing, they ambled back towards the Road through the brush.

They passed a stand of reedy silver trees that had black scars and marks all over them, as if a wild army had run through. The Hound reached out and pulled from one a leaf, handed it to the girl, and as she looked at the little papery arrowhead he told her to remember the leaf, and the tree.

"If you break off a branch it drips a kind of honey water; it won't feed you well, but it'll help. Should what you choose to eat be a bloody tree, out of everything." She waited for him to remark on the net, but he didn't; nevertheless, she felt the smirk riding above her as clearly as if she'd seen it.

As they neared the outskirting wood of the Road they saw, again, evidence of men. There was a torn rag fluttering, hooked to a briar; it was a sleeve of a blouse with a dirty cuff. Footsteps, again, stopping as they passed. Breaks in the brush like a maze; clumsy from men's shoulders, not neat from the wandering deer in rut, all of this adding slowly. She forced away the thought of the stranger and his wife and instead thought of the quail man in the creek, shaking as they passed, and how she imagined the little men with their bog-iron. She felt better; she hummed to herself and thought lustfully on again possessing the red cloak she'd left at home, and on having new slippers made, and on pie. The Hound, bored, began a murmured diatribe on the northern cities to which she barely listened, and he trailed away, defeated. And then, as the sky blued to purple and they both were lost in the intensity of their separate thoughts, the wood cleared and the Road lay bare before them, wide and dirty.

They passed few riders, and a staggering man in the gutter. She was nervous still until she noted how much taller they were than the other riders; it was as if they were passing by on a great ship. It was then that she understood the safety of their prior route. They were as a great ship in a harbour, impossible not to stare after. The Hound was nothing if not the Hound, and she– And the black horse. She felt a sudden gratitude for the anonymity of the wood. They rode quick on the clear way, much faster than before. It was not long before she saw smoke curling in streams in the distance, and then the rambling structure came to view.

The inn was ancient; as old as the Road itself, or older, a sagging house rebuilt a hundred times and added to and covered over again with so much thatch and wattle and vines it looked like a small mountain, rising from its loam. It was steaming with cooking and shouts of laughter, smoking from all chimneys, the two low kitchen windows pulsing with light. Circling about it were dogs and cats and raggy boys, all denied entrance, all hoping for the scrap-bucket and ducking clear of the horses. The Hound waved them away, tied the horse and lifted her down, left his bags packed but pulled from hers her cloak and a shawl. He bid her cover her hair and she did while he frowned down at her, and the raggy boys watched from the brush and whistled through their teeth at her, soft whistles meshing with the birdcalls of the early evening.

Then he stooped and ran his knuckles through the mud at their feet, brought his hand to her face. She jerked away but he held her fast and brushed at her cheekbone lightly with the mud.

"No, I can't." She held his wrist away, and he grimaced at her and asked her how easy she'd like to make it for the lions, anyhow, and then she let him. The awning was black thatch; the door was as thick as a stone wall and shining black, ancient wood gone all pitch-black and glassy from the thousands upon thousands of hands. Warmth blew out from under it in gusts.

When they opened it and entered there was a stall in the laughter; her heart stopped until she saw it was not herself, but the scar, that had caused it.


	15. Chapter 15

This chapter contains a nonconsensual act. -W.G.

It was a glorious room to come in from, after the chill dark of the wood; warm and steaming with the smells of breads baking and wines and stews, low plank tables filled, no, packed with men and their bowls and plates full and steaming as well and she couldn't help but think how all the raggy boys must sigh when they looked inside. It was all yellow inside, all gold. The rafters were black with smoke but the gold came from the great fire in the hearth and from the unspoken thing an inn of the wood always has, which is the glow of the hunters home from the hunt. She looked around her and saw, for a second's glimpse, a secret of men: the raw simplicity at the core of them, their hands grateful for their cups, their voices shouting over one another so that others might hear and approve of the stories of their exploits.

There was a girl bustling with a platter of cups that the men were barking after. Sansa looked at her; she had a straight back and a high bust and a purpled split at her lower lip. The girl looked at Sansa, narrowed her eyes, and Sansa, cowed, stepped behind the Hound. When she looked up again she saw the avid gazes of the men rolling from the bustling girl to herself, and she was glad when the Hound's gaze forced a hunch-shouldered man into abandoning his seat at one of the benches. She sat, and the tall man sat beside her, and he raised his hand to the cut-lip girl.

Her plate came and it was a sea of food, enormous, like a fever dream after the lean hares of her wood. The stares made her eat delicately at first, but then she forgot herself; the mash was runny and the beef tough, but the bread. It had soft chunks of late-summer fig inside, was laced with thick strings of burnt honey all crackled on the top. She hunched over it with unfocused eyes and ate, simple as an animal. Honey was in her hair, on her wrists; her companion didn't notice. He, too, was hungry. It was nauseating, how much he could eat, and how quickly. She wondered briefly if she was embarrassed; it wasn't that, though, it was something else. He ate four of his own plates and then ate what she hadn't, and he drank. He leaned back after, saw her watching the girl with the cut lip, and he bent down to her ear. "Now's the time, if you wanted. You know I'll drink; you could get away later. Serve mash here, and later, serve all the road." He tapped the back of her hand with his spoon. She saw it clearly as he tapped, the handle black with use, hundreds of black nicks in the wood, toothmarks, all in the bowl of it. She squinted at him, remembered the net. "Is that how my pretty song ends?" And he laughed, leaned his arm against hers, raised his hand again for the cut-lip girl.

He gave her some of his wine, watching her as she drank it. It burnt in her throat and made her tired, and suddenly she wanted the wood again. The pressure of the stares encircling her was great; it was too loud in the room, and the Hound was somehow frightening to her, in some way different, not contained. He looked down at her for a while and then rose, slow and scraping hauberk against the table plank, and walked to the kitchen. She looked after him and saw the stares all at her, bright hungry glances. One big man her father's age grinned right through the dirt on her cheek, right through the cloak; he licked slowly at his lower lip, and she put her eyes to the spoon and kept them there. Then the Hound was walking back and the stares turned away like doors closing, a wave of doors closing quick as he passed, and she was sad, then, for the cut-lip girl.

He pulled her up, not ungentle, and they went outside to where the raggy boys were circling the packed black horse. The Hound waved at them again and they scattered like little arrows back to the brush. He unpacked the horse, pulled down the bucket of feed from the ledge and dumped some in the trough, and looked at the girl. She nodded, acquiescing, and took her bag from him and rubbed at the dirt on her cheek with her sticky palm. She was full, she was tired. They walked back in. The cut-lip girl frowned at their bags and then motioned to the kitchen.

The kitchen was a bustle of steams and smells and shouting girls whipping at eggs; they all gazed at Sansa with a greedy curiosity. It felt much the same as the stares of the men, and with the same fierce hunger, but Sansa didn't mind it at all. It was for her pretty dress and cloak.

In the center of the kitchen stood the innkeeper's wife, and the bustle revolved around her. She was a tiny creature with a dried-apple face and heavy skirts, and she clicked her mouth at the coin the Hound had passed over with a worldliness. The Hound laughed at that, shrugged the bags higher on his shoulder, tapped his wrist against Sansa's arm. The little wife squinted and swayed, looking up at the Hound in the kitchen firelight, tall against the rafters, then dropped her head and looked at Sansa, a bright glare coming from the puckered face. Her pupils blew, taking in the girl, and Sansa felt a gust of nakedness before them. _They're looking for us and she's heard; she knows, can't be helped, it's already over_. There was nothing but recognition in those old eyes, recognition and terrible pity. Sansa's mouth trembled and the little wife sucked in her own lower lip, a mirror image, and turned abrupt, fumbling in the oversmock for keys.

She walked back through the crooked sill and they followed her through a maze of stooped halls and doors, Sansa's step dwarfed by the clanking of the man behind her, the clanking dwarfed by the pounding in her ears. The halls were narrow, the doorway dark that the apple-woman's key opened. The Hound walked in before them and was kicking over the straw in the corner of the room when Sansa felt a claw grip on her wrist and looked down at the little dry hand with its copper ring– she was pulling Sansa down so she could hear the whisper. "If you can't abide it, I've work here. Come to the kitchen'n the night and Geof'll hide you proper til th' big man's gone." Sansa stared into the tiny face in the half-dark, saw the expression in the eyes. The whisper hoarsened. "I've been a girl once, 'tis a sorry thing, what men does t'us." Then the claw relinquished its hold and she was hobbling away in her smocked skirts back down the hall to the kitchen.

As she watched after her, Sansa saw that the recognition had been merely empathy, merely memory. She was relieved, but quick behind that relief was a vast gratitude: the apple-woman and her brisk assurance, her misplaced pity, was nothing if not the Nan of her childhood and of home. She thought on the bravery of the offer for a while, then turned to her companion.

"What a shit this is," he said, surveying the sloping room, grey rugs on a pile of what was more hay than rush. There was one bubbled glass, two hands-breadths wide, in a sill that afforded a view of the kitchen's back walls and the dark sty beyond. A little hearth blew low and smoky in the corner, but in the other corner there was a short wooden tub, beyond all expectation, steaming heavily, a gift of the gods. He noted her. "I'm going to drink, I'll come back late. You'll not go out to the hall, they've seen enough of you to last them." She nodded absently, her attention consumed, and he grinned lopsided sharp at her. "Lady of the North, and her castle," a brush of hand indicated the straw bed, "and her guard–" then himself, the grin deepening, and then to the window, out to the sty, "and all the court." She shook her head, dismissing it, and he locked her in and left.

The bath was what it was, a bath, the simplest and best thing in the world. She dozed in it for a while, sang to herself, examined her wet hair in the low light. He didn't return. She washed her dresses in it, after, and the soapy water went black. She put her wet dresses by the fire and then lay by the fire herself with her hair splayed to dry, comfortable and alone, listening to the shouts and clatters from the hall. When she woke and dragged herself to the bed she was dry and warm, the hay grassy-sweet; she slept so deep he had to shake her to bring her back.

"Up, up now," pulling at her shoulders, "get up, get your bag. Up." He had his fingers deep in her arm; hot wine smell. He was weaving, slurring, his hair falling over her, and she felt as if a great toy had been wound again and she was back in her keep on the green night, before all of the wood. She protested but he kept shaking her, was cursing, and she crawled out of the bed, scooped her damp dresses into her bag, tied her slippers on and followed him down the hall. She kept her eyes on his back through the empty hall, did not look down at herself, did not see the bloodstains on her sleeves where he'd held them; and then they were through the door and back into the night again.

It was late night with only a pale moon and so the Hound packed in the dark, hurriedly and clumsily, pulling the bag from her hand rough, speaking to the horse rough. He set her on the horse, fingers pinching, and then stumbled as he tried for the stirrup, stumbled against the horse; the horse tossed its great head back at him, snapping at the air, eyes rolling in rage. Sansa's heart caught, but he laughed, smacked the flank hard with a palm and tried again, was heavily behind her then, and kicked. They flew back up the road, bags rolling, her ribs clacking together.

The Road was wide and deserted, looked a long river before them in the watery moonlight. She felt as though eyes were watching them from the gutters and shuddered when she realized it was likely true. They rode far, slowed after a time; the thighs behind hers tensed the horse off the road and to the gutter and they picked back into the wood.

How different it is to ride in the wood at late night: the slow step of the horse, the silence passing through the blue stands. One feels as a ghost at first, unworldly and removed, and then a synchronicity takes place between the rider and the wood itself. If they are unwary and allow it to enter, the rider will then feel the brush of exultation that it is to be a hunter in the night, and they will feel against their throat the breath of the oldest god; it is beautiful, and it is so, so cold.

It is a very dark thing that men pray to, when they pray in the wood. Sansa felt the breath without understanding it and thought, mistakenly, that it was the wood that had changed.

The Hound was swaying in the saddle behind her; she feared the horse and so she reached up the arm under the hauberk and pinched at him to keep him awake. He laughed and rested his chin at the back of her head for a moment, slurred, "I'm drunk, not dying, little bird; I've fallen off this horse a hundred times. He'll come back." She kept pinching him every time she felt him begin to dip, and he laughed every time.

And then they were far enough in the dense wood again, and the moon was beginning to fade. There was a tiny clearing, more just a break in the underbrush, and the Hound had had enough and so he stalled the horse, and to her shock nearly fell from it as he'd said, and unpacked it, throwing the bags down. He laid on the bare ground like an animal, laughing raspy when she gave him his pallet, but then he rolled onto it anyway and put his arm over his eyes. She was left in the dark, uncertain, the horse looming by her like a black ship, the man at her feet. She had very little choice; she laid her pallet out beside his and curled into it and listened to the soft sounds of the wood.

She lay and worried on why they'd had to leave; if they'd been seen for who they were or simply that he was drunk and was tired of the inn. She sighed in the dark and turned on her side away from him and then she heard him shifting, felt him rise back out of his cesspool. He moved, rose on his arm. The warm breath crossing above her told her that he was leaning half over her. He lay that way for a long minute and then shifted, pulling her hair back from her neck; she felt it caught, tangled, in his fingers. His knuckles dropped against her, clumsy with drunkenness. She felt him lean close, his breath laced with wine. Her heartbeat rose in her chest; she pressed her eyes shut and prepared herself for the kiss that childhood tales dole out as reward for beauty and good behavior.

He rested his face on the back of her neck, heavy, opened his mouth wide. She felt his lips slide back from his teeth, felt him lying openmouthed, teeth against her neck, behind her, and she waited, shivering.

Then he bit her. A good bite, solid and meaning it, jaw tensing like he was biting into an apple. He hung there a few seconds with her throat in his mouth, her eyes open wide in the dark, and then pulled away slow, his teeth dragging her. Her heart had stopped; there was nothing in her chest, no beat, nothing at all. He hung over her, drew the back of his hand over the place he'd bit and wiped away the wetness. A thousand years passed. She felt him roll back over, felt him settle. His breathing slowed. The arm against her back twitched as he dropped into sleep.

She didn't know anything, couldn't know anything; eventually, she slept; the woods around them crackled and hummed with early morning, as they do.


	16. Chapter 16

She woke in the early blue dawn to the sound of him gagging in his sleep.

He sat up quick, retching, and she rolled hurriedly from him. He laughed at her, coughing, patting her shoulder with one hand and holding his chest with the other, and rose to walk shaking out into the brush. She heard him coughing up what he could of the wine, heard him walking back spitting and snorting, and then he sat beside her again and she looked at him in the early light. He was pale, grey eyes tearing, and grinning. He had a spray of dried rust up his tunic, up his throat, up his good cheek. She couldn't think of a thing to say to him, and it was just as well. He gave her another pat, rough, stretched out with his arms above his head and was asleep again, quick as that.

She sat and watched the rise and fall of his chest and bit at her knuckle and thought on what had been done to her– the bite, and the breath she had felt in the wood. The bite had shown her something interesting, but it was the breath that had turned her. Her septa's crackly voice came from far in memory. "Don't ever–Sansa, listen to me now, please, put that down. Sansa, you must never go to the wood alone. I know that, dear, but listen. If you did ever disobey–you are a good girl, I know that. If you ever did, and saw some men, I want you to promise me that you would run and hide from them. Thank you. Because, dear, that's why." And then the memory trickled away, and then to replace it a dark flash of a tarred head on a pole, pushed away fast. And she looked through the break in the treetops above her to the pale unclouded sky. _I know, now, about the wood, and what it does_. Her sister had loved it, Robb, he too; Bran, always climbing, never keeping his promise, obeying only the wood, called away into it–but she, no, and then… Had not she felt that breath, last night; hadn't she felt the wood, whispering cold and sweet?

She looked over at the man and saw the blood, and saw the beast; the thing turned in her again. This great black rider, sick now and pale in the dawn, had hidden in her bed once to overpower and then to chew away. That's why the dagger. That was for the song, and she knew the song now; she'd heard it singing itself in the stranger as he'd ground himself against her. And yet– and here was the thing, biting her knuckle, squinting at him; somehow, she'd won and the Hound had broken apart and had given a vow instead of what he'd meant to give, and had wept. _So, then, may the rider and the man exist together._ Not just in him, perhaps in all men, perhaps all–perhaps herself, at one time, in one way. And then she was running again down the steps and telling Cersei in gasps what her father meant to do.

The changeling blinking in the sun with tears all down her face was nothing, at that moment, if not a woman.

The man woke late in the warm sun, coughing and rubbing his throat, but she was not there; she was picking her way through the wood around him in a wide circle, looking at things. She heard his cough and came back, walking slowly, saw the naked relief in his eye as she stepped into the clearing. He beckoned and held a bag out to her. It was filled heavy with lumps wrapped in cheesecloth. She pulled one apart and smiled at it and then sat next to him and ate the sticky fig-honey bread and felt the warm sun on her shoulders. It was some time before they spoke.

"Whose blood was it? Did they die?" She thought of the big man who had licked his lips at her and felt a childish vengeance.

"I don't know who he was but he knew me, all the same. Yes, he did die, of course." The Hound turned his face away from the sweet smell of her bread, swallowing rapidly.

"How are you sure that he knew you? Did he accuse you? What did he say?" She moved away from him to finish her meal, a small pity.

"He didn't say a thing. He didn't have to. He wouldn't look at me."

"Don't most people not look at you?"

He laughed, a bark cut short by the threat of a gag. "No." His red eye at her was appreciative. "No, little bird. Most people stare, and long, too. Only people with something to hide don't look." His mouth twitched. _Is it from the burn that he does that? Maybe it's the effort of not saying all that he's thinking._

"I didn't look, at first. Until you yelled."

"Perhaps you have something to hide." He was grinning his lopsided grin at her, his jaw all sharp and wolfish. She thought of her many sins: they were nothing, a droplet, compared to his. It came to her then, to her discomfiture, that he most likely thought none of his sins as sins, merely as actions. _Clearly they are __sins_, she thought piously, _poor man_.

"Do you think the word will get back, even though that man died?" She'd finished her bread and was licking the honey from her knuckles.

The Hound sighed, rubbed his hands over his eyes and then pressed them at his temples. "Could be. But it doesn't matter. We've already gone and the price was a small one. Did you enjoy your bath?"

She was stunned then at the gift, and at its price. And at his scales, which although far different from hers, were yet as cold.

He rose with difficulty and walked into the brush. When he returned he had a straight pole in his hand that he'd hacked down, and he sat next to her to whittle down the end, and she found herself too shy of him to speak of the bite. And so then eventually he rose, looking down at her with the crude spear in his hand, and she looked up at him and saw his very black outline in the nimbus of sun, and he said, "I feel like shit and I don't want to ride. I'm going to the creek; you can come with me or you can stay by the horse." And he walked away, then, leaving the bright sun still in her eye.

When a boy first engages in hunting, he will at one point find himself stumbling against prey that has been standing silent before him and watching him expectantly. He will look at the thing, shocked, and then the prey will step back into the woods and be gone. It is a frustrating, if elegant, thing to happen, and it happens constantly when one hunts. Later, as he ages, the hunter will understand that the prey is seduced a bit by its fear and its curiosity, and that it will dog the hunter simply because it must. And the hunter will use this to his benefit; he will let his steps carry, he will wave his hand before he fires, he will let himself show. How it is that the hunter is pleased by the fear is obvious; how it is that the prey, too, loves the fear, and is lured slow to its destruction, is unknown. The weakness in the well was a bright and glittering thing, wasn't it? How terribly interesting, that glitter; it was certain to be more interesting, the closer one got. She found herself rising to follow the Hound as he walked through the brush with his spear.

It is in this way that the beast is allowed the company of man: by simply wearing his clothes, but always keeping the furred coat bristling underneath, and occasionally letting it show.


	17. Chapter 17

She followed him; he heard her steps behind him and hung back til she was abreast with him, and they walked together through the brush in silence.

He was still pale with sick and she wondered why he liked to drink at all, if that was what it won him. He eyed her, a glint of grey from the side, and when she caught it she frowned at him. He frowned back, and patted at her shoulder.

When they reached the creek he rolled his breeches to his knees, yawning, and took off his stained shirt and left it on the bank. He wasn't much smaller without it, same as the plate; he was brown but laced with scars so completely that in truth he was as white as she. She sat herself on a rock ledge and as she hung over it to look down into the creek small fish darted out, afraid of her shadow. He waded out, shading his eyes, dropping bread from his pocket to the slow surface of the creek, his spear in his other hand. She watched him watch the fish. They darted all around his legs in the water after the bread and she piped to him from her rock, "Why not those?"

"They're tiny, just look at them, I'd be here all day. Shhhh. They'll leave if you keep talking. As will I." She doubted that, but kept quiet and watched his face reflected in the water. He didn't appear to be blinking. His good side was calm and pale, his bad side, fragmented by the fishes' ripples, looked a tiled mosaic of black and red. She thought of how simple he'd made it for her: while most men had their bad side under their faces, his sat in front, one exact half, to remind her. She thought how monstrous it would be if she could see what everyone's face-under-face might be. _It would have made King's Landing much easier_, and then thought a little, solemnly, on her own face– _And they'd have known me right away, wouldn't they_. How transparent she had been, really, anyway; and yet, she was still alive.

He was motionless, waiting for the fish, eyelids hooded, deadly patient. She turned over and leaned back on her palms, looked at the sky and was glad that he'd not wanted to ride. She watched a hawk rolling lazy through the clouds and touched where the Hound'd bit. He was old, and she'd noticed that the older one got the more difficult an apology came, quite unlike the admissions which had tumbled constantly from her in her youth. The bite had been ridiculous, something an animal would do. Clearly it came from the weakness in the well; an anger, a fear.

She turned then and watched one big shadow winding slow around the rocks, wind up to the Hound, slow like a ship sailing underwater. He aimed, she saw, for the shadow underneath the shadow, and he leaned down quick and then the shadow became a big bright silver wriggle on the end of the spear, and he was wading over, triumphant. She watched him pull rocks around and lay the speared fish by her in its shallow creek-bed pocket, giving her another side-eyed glint, and then waded back. She waited through two more, deadly patient on her own, and then he, after looking down judiciously at the little creek-pen, turned to her on her rock.

"This is enough. I don't know that I even want to eat them, fucking wine. Fly away back, now, I need to wash. Stay by the horse." And then he handed her the spear. She grimaced at the end all striped with shreds of fishscale and he grinned wolfish at her, good eye wrinkling, liking the disgust, standing well above her. She stared at him then. It was direct, unlike the muted gazes courtesy taught to give, and new, and she shocked herself with how easy it was, to look sharply and to not falter, to not spare him. It skewered him and he lost the grin and then stepped back, cowed a little, shied his face away as a horse does when it doesn't want its bit. But, pity for the beast–before he turned his eye away, she saw the weakness shining clear in it. It was herself that she saw, simple as that.


	18. Chapter 18

She took up her spear and turned, left him there in his creek. She dawdled on her way back, knocking the fishscales off her spear through the brush, eyes barely focused, thinking. Because of this she lost the broken path back to the horse and suddenly she was alone with her spear in the bright green gloss of midday. But somehow the breath had made the wood– what was the word, not familiar, certainly not comforting; terrible still, yes, but known, as if they were conspirators together at some secret. It was now as if the great wall of bramble and silence trembled with her steps, and broke for her to enter. She could hear the creek behind her, she walked in a slow circle, looking for the path, pulling her fingers through her hair, humming.

It was in this way that she stepped directly into the path of the man that had been watching her from the brush.

He was before her, suddenly, her head jerking up, breath escaping her. A rangy young man loose-limbed in a doeskin shirt, quiver at his shoulder, a wide brown brow and wide-spaced brown eyes, and he was staring at her. He was far taller; she saw his nostrils flare, saw the quiver, saw the wiry hands. She stepped back from him; he stepped forward, the smallest step.

It was her septa's voice that came first, crackling through the green. "Promise me that you would run and hide from them, yes, thank you," and her septa's head, then, all small and tarred. And then she remembered that she held a spear, and it was the Hound's familiar growl, next, the plate of scar cool and hard against her warm cheek, "all you can learn from that is to expect it," and her hand tightened on the branch.

Later in her life she would occasionally stand by her window and think about the wide brown gaze of the man in the woods, and of the changeling she had been. She would wonder if the world hands out to each man his portion of trial, a line of lessons all in a straight row, or if it drops them unequally in scatters, laughing, little arrows hitting some men, watching them die, struck; or perhaps walking on, healing around the quills.

In any case, it was the scales and the trials and the thing that she was that loosed the grip on the spear, put her shoulders back, brought her eyes to his, set the small jaw–and then she nodded, a slight nod, human, and so devastatingly regal in its humanity.

The rangy man stood still, everything still, for a long moment; a long moment of their eyes meeting, and then nodded back, slight, and took a step back, then another, and then melted elegantly back into the wood.

It is possible that late in that night, as the huntsman sat at his bench at the inn with his cup and his plate, with the glow of the fire and the shouting men around him, he drank too much and told his stolid companions that while hunting he had stepped into the path of the elven, bespeared Queen of the Wood, beautiful and terrible as a warship with her red hair like a cape around her, and that she had, in her great mercy, let him go.


	19. Chapter 19

The Hound came slinking back to her in the early dusk, clean of blood, and lay the gutted fish on the bundle of kindling she'd collected, and looked at her from the side of his eye, his face turned away, grey looks darting, calculating.

Something about the huntsman had been as important as the bite; she'd digest it later, when it was dark and she could be alone with her thoughts. She squinted closely at her companion. He wasn't much better, clean; but he looked more human now without the dirt and blood on his cheek and under his eye and in the cracks of his scar. The cut in the scar on his brow was now just a plum wheal, nearly indistinguishable from the rest; his black hair shone, the bloodstain on his tunic was now only faint. He walked slowly to her, stopped a pace away from her. She watched him kneel, wrap the silvery bodies in folds of birchbark, watched the grey glint slide to her through his black hair and then dart away, back and forth.

Their kitchen cat had shown no interest in the children; she'd reserved all of that for the chewed hole beside the scullery door, in front of which she'd lain every night like an angry rug. Occasionally a grey shadow would show at the entrance to the hole, quivering, and then vanish; show again, vanish, show again. Sansa smoothed her dress, watched the man build the fire, and waited.

He coughed and fanned smoke away and then sat and looked at the fire, frowning; she did so as well for a bit and then looked up to watch the sweet-smelling threads of smoke curling up through branches, and listened to the hollow-barrel sound of the horse behind them breathing through its heavy sleep. Her thoughts turned to Winterfell, to how it must be, as the long summer was truly ending. _My people walking ruts through the snow, the pools of hot spring steaming in the snow._ The fire popped loud then, bringing her out. She turned to see that her companion had aimed his scowl nearer to her and was eying her, wary, through the lank black curtain.

As it stood, after the huntsman, it was easier for her. She leaned back on her palms and bared her little teeth at him in mimicry.

She saw his pupils widen before he laughed, and then he ducked his head and was grinning at her again, good side wrinkling, and was digging through the pocket in his tunic. He leaned over to her, held something in his closed fist out to her. She held out her hand under it, felt the rough knuckles graze warm against her palm before he released the thing. It dropped tinkling into her hand, and the first thing she thought was _a needle_, but then she looked close at it glinting prettily in the light and it was, of course, her hairpin, sharp and gold, dried blood clotty at the point.

She looked up at him and he was laughing softly, rueful, shaking his head at the fire. _Not just tears, then, for a weapon_. Beautiful gilt thing, thinner and more tensile than a twig, and yet it had slid right past the plate like an arrow, hadn't it? She pursed her lips and looked at the tall man. _And he gives it back, strange creature_. And so she picked away the blood, leaned over and patted his knee, straightened up and slid the pin back into her hair. But along with the pat, and unbeknownst to her, she'd sent over a gift in return: comfort, hidden in compassion. He drew it quick into his black well and savored it, wordless, and thumbed along his jaw, and watched the fire. After some time he lay back with his wrists crossed behind his head and muttered that he was hungry, finally. She leaned back herself and watched the embers brightening in the dying light.

And so they waited for the fish to bake in their bark folds, and then opened and ate them, greedily. She heard rustling beyond them in the wood: beggars after the wonderful smells, pawing and snuffling and hoping. The Hound threw a rock at the brush and the bright glowing eyes slid away chastened into the night without waking the horse. After they'd had eaten, they sat in companionable silence together. She was drowsy from her long night, and the sound of the hollow barrel was lulling her; it was a break in her thoughts when he yawned and rasped to her that they'd ride early and make the lost time. She turned to see him hunched, rubbing sleepily at his eyes with the heels of his hands, just a man sitting by a fire.

"How much longer, do you think?" She'd lost track of how many days it had been. Sometimes, in her dreams, they were riding in a vast circle; she would look up and see that the moss on the trees showed south and she would look up at the Hound, who would be smiling above her, the oar solid against her ribs. She'd wake with a start, always, feeling the bellows behind her, and pull a hand from her pallet to wave it before her face in the dark night and then feel with relief the chill, which was increasing every night. _North, still. Still going North. He doesn't lie. _

He pulled a bone from his teeth and said, "One full turn of the moon, more than likely." _Not so long. That's–well, that isn't very long at all, though._ She gazed at him; the grey eyes were hooded. "One turn, only?"

He said nothing, chewing idly at the bone, and looked away from her, out into the wood.


	20. Chapter 20

She pried after him a bit, but he chewed at his bone and frowned into the wood and was unwilling to speak. It was late, and cooling steadily; he beckoned to her, kicked out the fire. They went to their pallets with the night birds fluting all above them and soft steps and crackles about them. He laid heavily beside her, a solid black outline in the dark, and she lay and fingered through her hair and calculated the time. Twelve days, it had taken to cross the Neck, before with her father and sister– twelve, for only that. They were deep in the wood now and rode slow. She put her fists under her warm chin and thought.

The huntsman rose again in her mind before she slept. Those wide brown eyes had held an odd deference; to her young mind it was simple: she was beautiful, and good. The complexity of her power and of the world itself was as yet unknown to her, and so she rolled to her side and curled, and listened to the ragged breathing of the tall man and his horse, and soon dreamed.

A roaring sea woke her; there was, above her, a great howling– she blinked up into the sky and saw the wind whipping the treetops in circles, every leaf whistling, a great roar altogether, and she was cold. Never had she, after an argument with their implacable mother, stolen outside at night to sleep in a rage under a tree, as her brothers and sister had done; never had she run away, never had she heard the swoop of ice wind swing down from the high North, pushing at trees, scattering the loam and bramble, littering branches in waves to the ground. So she pressed her cold hands against the hard back beside her and shivered, and listened to the rushing roar, harsher than a flooding river.

The man snorted himself half-awake, muttered through his sleep. He rolled to his back and reached a hand into her pallet. She froze, felt him grab at her and then catch her thin cold hand, which he pulled into his pallet and stuffed unceremoniously into the warm pocket of his underarm. He grunted at the cold of it, and then rolled back into sleep.

She put her other hand under her own arm; the roar continued, but she slept through it.

He woke her before dawn. It was chill and sharp but the sky was calm. Sansa yawned and shivered crosslegged in her cloak in the near-dark, and he handed her bread and a cut of cheese and sat across from her to eat his. Steam shot in pennants down at them from the looming horse, a small fog. The sun rose. The early dawn showed the clearing awash in shrapnel from the storm. There was a ragged nest on its side by the ashes of their fire, peppered with down. "Hawk," the Hound said, toeing at it with interest, his head to the side. She saw, for a moment, his eyes glossed with engrossment, a shadow of immaturity as he inspected the thing. It was disconcerting; she looked away. In his absorption the gaunt face had smoothed and the scar that still held half his face tight seemed even more a mask.

They rode out as the morning blued into glow, and the cold burrowed sharp and stung at the place inside where her ears met her jaw. It was an echo of her home, and she was glad of it. The sun was higher and the chill dissipated somewhat when their yawning, rambling talk turned to her sister.

"You could have run, as she did. Wretched little wolf; I shouldn't worry about her, if I were you. Threw that sword right in the river, and no doubt it weighed more than she did." The raspy laugh behind her shook her shoulderblades.

"She ruined everything," the girl said, looking up, "it all started just then. She always–"

He snorted into her hair. "Ruined everything? Heavy burden to put on a girl no bigger than a weasel. No, little bird, it was all well ruined before."

"You killed her friend, that boy. You hunted him down and cut him up, they told me. My father even told me." The tall man above her nodded against her crown, equanimous, and she was quiet for a while, digesting this polarity. When she spoke again she was ripe with the haughtiness of youth. "That you would kill someone, especially someone that you don't know, just because Joffrey might want you to, or the Queen…" In her mind, as she spoke to him, grew a difficulty. Was it the Hound, really, who had killed the butcher's boy; was it Sansa, herself, by lying, was it the Queen? Perhaps it was all of their hands, slicing together. _If Cersei hadn't asked, if he had denied–_ The tangling knot of human hands that is the true reality of tyranny was slowly becoming clearer; she faltered into silence.

"And you'll take flowers from a knight just the same, and be charmed. Let me tell you– let me tell you what those flowers are." The Hound was laughing, angry, shaking her with the bellows. The wood was dense and close, and they were occupied in their small argument; it was with this inattention that they stepped into a wide break in the brush and the pack of men, half-armoured and circled by gaunt horses, leapt up silent from around the ashes of the fire.


	21. Chapter 21

The pack there in the center of the clearing were silent, but the hacks of their swords were as notes of music–the Hound's first, and most sonorous. In that startled instant she saw them clearly. _Knights_, Sansa thought, then _no, wait, they're not, and they're not half-armoured_–the bits of plate and mail incongruous, mismatched arms only partially scratched away–_it's only… That's all they have_. They looked like mummers undressing after a show, but they were graverobbers; the Hound looked like a butcher, and was a butcher. Aggression made the air crisper. They stared at each other for only a breath before all the pieces moved.

She was as sheltered as her birth had allowed, but the world was what it was, and she'd seen men fight. This, though, was not fighting. The tall man was behind her and then, fluidly, not; he was laughing angrily at her and then he was on the ground, still laughing but now a thing transformed.

Apologists of the wood, in their innocence, will say that its predators are without malice: that the cycle of hunger and hunting is emotionless and born of necessity. Sansa was only a child, but still she'd seen the fox's red grin as it slunk from the henhouse, heard the fox chuckle to itself as it danced away back into the night. The Hound's own laughter had changed; she heard now the chuckle of a man who has always taken with pleasure the first, and reddest, bite.

And so he was before her unrobed, the best of himself, shoulders loose, sure of step, and crackling all over, every inch, with death. She watched as he transformed the men in the clearing, making them waver, watched his joy in it.

The five men crouched armed before him, all jangly in their mummer's play. They had the grim look of capability, and were not weak. One of them had a plated breast and sleeves of full mail and then bare legs in thin breeches, with rags tied at the knee. Three had swords, one an axehead on a long pole, and one was seated, still, by the ashes of the fire. He was older than the others, and religious; he knew a _daimon_ when he saw one and he didn't deign to rise. All of them were breathing loud, wary, with ashed brows and curled beards; all, including the seated man, were burred with readiness.

The Hound slid forward three paces and hung there grinning, a taste away from them; it was the seated man whose croaky voice halted the sword as it began its low swing.

"It'll none of it fit you, anyhow, great bastard that y'are. You could give it to the girl, she'll look a treat in Jer's plate. Better'n Jer." The seated man spat. "Not saying much, that."

It was a fierce weapon, this bravery. The Hound's point stilled in midswing. Sansa looked at the wiry Jer, a wraith in a dented cuirass with a neck standing in cords above it. Jer was looking at the Hound, his brown knuckles white on his pommel; an injustice, that cheap sword he held, but he held it steady.

The speaker cleared his throat and continued, unshaken. "Going North? Fine place for you, innit, til you get back to your hells. You, an all of them forsaken ones what's left, you can keep it. We came from there an I'll tell you what you'll find–" The Hound swooped close, brought the point in an arc to the speaker's lips where it rested bright, and slit, and leaked a glossy trail into the man's grey bristled jawline. The wraiths about him reflected on this. Sansa saw the fist on the poleax tighten, hesitate; and they drew back til it was only the Hound, squatting before the speaker, that remained at the ring of ash. She saw the speaker's eyes narrow; she saw Jer's face close and become impassive, she saw the poleax hanging ready.

She couldn't hear what the Hound asked; it was rasped and too low, and then the speaker, old eyes and slit lip both gleaming red, nodded slow, the point pulling his lip to a cleft, grotesque. The Hound stood up quick from the ashes, larger somehow in his rage, and turned to her. The wraiths watched his back, drawing together like crows at a mess. He walked quick to her, his face all curdled with frustration. It would have frightened her, had she not known him.

She didn't know him, really; she coughed a gasp as he strode burning past her and smacked the horse squarely on the croup with a palm. It bugled and danced heavily from him, tossing and snorting, and sidestepped, and jogged with affront into the dense wood.

And then she was riding the horse, alone.

She heard nothing behind her. If the men were speaking, it was softly, there was no screaming. The horse–great black mountain, not really a horse at all–seemed unaware of her. The ground below, so far–she could jump–all briars, all brambles; he would _step _on her, he was so tall. His slow jog was still too fast, if he would just stop, she could swing her leg over, maybe, jump that way, off the side–she ducked as a vine swung at her–he was tall, her panicked breathing was hollow in her ears; she was dizzy, her hands numb, she was going to fall…

She leaned forward and clutched at the great silky black neck in terror, wrapped her arms against it, and he stopped short. And he stood there, chewing at nothing, twitching, snorting. Her vision cleared; she drew back, and he stood, his affront calmed. As she sat stock-still atop him in the quiet, and looked at the green wood over his brow, it came to her–_now I am the black rider_. And for a moment the fear was gone. She tasted the omnipotence and to her surprise, found it oddly hollow.

She waited there and patted at the coat; it wasn't much longer until the strangled cries came from behind her.


	22. Chapter 22

The cries were a crescendo, a howl: it broke, shook, and it ended. There was a long hush–and then there were steps in the brush, coming for her. She sat astride her great warhorse and waited with her knuckles in the mane, but it was the Hound that came stalking back through the wood to her.

There was a shallow swath from collarbone to shoulder and his slit tunic hung soggy from it, but his face was calm. He grinned his way over and reached up to pull her from the horse, and she was small again on the ground. He ran his hand down the muzzle in atonement, gentle; stretched up and pulled off the slit tunic, frowned at it, and stood before her shivering. The cut had stopped steaming and the blood was starting to mat with clot. He wiped it with the wadded shirt. She clasped her hands behind her back and looked at him. For a while they regarded each other in silence.

"You killed them."

"I did." He grinned and pressed closed the slit at his collarbone. It wept clear rose-tinged fluid as his palm slid over it. "How much should I ask for, from your people? What is it now, six men? No, seven. Those skeletons back there, the bastard at the inn, that headless shit... You're expensive."

"Eight," she said, thinking of the butcher boy, seeing the list clearly, weighing it. _And nine for my father, but that's mine, not his; and it can't be paid, it's fathomless._

The Hound regarded her through narrowed eyes and laughed. "You mean to add me, too? Cruel, but you've got the right of it." He wiped away the rose gloss that was dripping down his chest, touched her shoulder with the other hand. "And how much did you hear of what that old fuck said? Tell me the truth."

"That they'd come from North, that they think we belong there–" _Why did that prick at her, what did that mean?_ "And, about that man's plate, that I should have it." She bore the weight of the stare for a while and finally he nodded.

"Mmm. All right. But you don't need it, do you." He tucked his chin to look at the weeping line. "I do, maybe. Look at this. It was that rat-looking bugger that had your plate. I'll bet he died thinking he'd got me, but it was me that got him. He's probably in hell right now, looking around and wondering where I am."

For some reason, Sansa laughed, in spite of the odd twinge she had felt for the small man– sympathy, perhaps. The Hound jerked his head up at her laughter and grinned sharp through the curtain at her, and turned to walk back towards the clearing, wiping at his arm. She followed him.

"Who were they? I thought they were knights, but their arms, they were all scratched away. And why are they–why were they here?"

He pushed a branch out of her way. "Deserters, I don't know, but I can tell you one thing I do know. Every bit of that plate came from a corpse, and now it's a corpse that wears it again. That old fuck robs a battlefield and thinks I'm a ghost come to collect?" He was talking to himself, now, even as he stared at her. "Looked at me and saw what he wanted to see, didn't he? And you do, too. Then I bleed, and he's surprised, he's disappointed. Piss on that. It's not that easy. He learned how real I was when I gutted him."

She stopped short at this and looked closely at him for a moment, and then he grimaced and pushed forward, and was back in the clearing.

The wraiths were still around the fire, but now they were all tumbled over each other and shining wet. The Jer was so small, only a dented cuirass with a dark pool in the hollow of the collar. His head was gone and she was glad to not see his face, thin and brown and mutely accusing. The others looked like they'd fallen during play, looked more like mummers than ever before. The sitting man was still crosslegged, but now he leaned back against the tumbled legs of his brethren, a pile of black entrails steamy in his lap, and his jaw hung open. Before Sansa turned away she looked quick at his glassy eyes and saw in them no fear at all.

The Hound was digging through the sacks behind the fire. The horses had fled from the cries–cheap mounts traded away for stolen arms, the Jer's cheap sword lying idle in his hand just the same now, without worth. _Not like the Hound's horse, not like the Hound's sword. He has some things to make up for the scar, maybe the gods do listen in a way. _She stood there quietly and looked at the great disparity of war, of men, the astounding void between those that have and those that do not–and she saw herself clearly, saw the gifts that had stacked themselves up in a glowing tower beside her trials, evening them, and she swallowed her nausea, and stood humbled in the face of it.

The Hound turned and misread her expression, rasped past the mummers to her. "Those men would break your bones; they'd tear each other apart fighting to tear you apart." He stood up, absently wiping at the cut. "Believe it. Look at them."

Her eyes darted back to the sitting man, to the absolution writ clear there in his sightless gaze. _Perhaps now he's seeing what he wanted to see. _It wasn't bravery she had heard in his voice, was it–it was acceptance, the relief of a man who is paying a long-due debt; she knew now about debt, she thought with a childish gravitas, and brought her knuckles to her mouth. _He'd been evil, but it wasn't me he wanted, it was the Hound. _She looked at the Hound, who was holding a cup he'd found and squinting judiciously at it. _Tear me apart, he'd said; and he'd killed them just like that. It could be the Hound sees what he wants to see as well. _For a second–but only that–she recalled him that morning, fully absorbed in the hawk's nest, a gangly boy shining through his eyes; a gangly, thwarted little knight.

He rose from his pawing and nodded to her, tossed something bright over the pile of mummers. She fumbled but caught it; it was a rough brooch, ancient beaten gold, crude work, a man's head wearing a mask of leaves. She stared at it, turned it. She liked it, and she didn't–it was crude but beautiful; it came from a dead man. She looked over at the Hound and saw him give her a slight shrug, thought of the inn, and again, took the gift.

He found what he'd been looking for and poured some of the wine over the cut, then sat by the bags and drank the rest and shivered. She sat by him, placed herself so the Jer's head was hidden from her on the ground behind the pile, and looked at her brooch. He pointed at the cuirass sitting there.

"He wouldn't have got me at all–only, the old one distracted me." The Hound's voice was diffident, but held, strangely, a tinge of apology, and so she reached out, touched lightly above the cut, a soft pat, and nodded, and he nodded back to her and shrugged again. "We should leave before the wood comes to take them. Buzzards on buzzards, I don't need to see that." He inspected the yellowish crust forming at his shoulder, and then lowered his head, looked at her from the corner of his eye. Sudden sly merriment trembled under his rasp as he leaned to her. "I suppose that plate would fit you, you know. First you'll have to get it off of him. Easier now that–"

She scowled and batted him away and rose, dusting her skirts, and he rocked with laughter that opened the cut again. He followed her past the heap of men back to the horse.

After they had ridden away the clearing was silent for some time. Then, slowly, patters came through the wood, soft steps. The brush waved a bit. A fox's bright head appeared and he slunk low to the mummers; the leaves above them shivered and the crows dropped down: one, two, three. A small battalion began to amass–here a rat, there another, now a wave, delicate little things dancing in.

The crow that balanced himself in the sitting man's lap was as black as the entrails, but far cheerier, and he cawed to his brethren, bragging, and did what he came to do. It never occurred to the girl, grown and thinking back on the sitting man, that redemption can be as simple as a crow. The bones lay under a pile of rusted plate in a clearing; they fell in on themselves over time, and the wood grew over them, as it must.

The girl and her companion rode away from there and soon were along a drying creekbed. There was only a trickle running through the pebbles, and so the horse had a clear lane. Steep mossy walls rose on either side of them, all studded with huge roots in snarls like black snakes. The creek had once raged–the walls rose higher than the horse's brow–but now the bed was a deep slice through the wood, and the cathedral of trees above spread its canopy. They were in a green tunnel.

The Hound had draped a rag over the cut and put over it another tunic, this one quilted for mail. She forgot herself and leaned back, and her head had rested against the cut. He said nothing, but he tensed; she jerked away and apologized, rode straight in the saddle, and he patted her arm.

The tunnel was darker than the wood and foggy with mist; it was the underbelly, it was beautiful. _How easy for us, if this led all the way North. It would be the opposite of the Kingsroad, we'd be hidden the whole way. _They rode in silence, him breathing warm wine over her while she daydreamed. The tunnel widened a bit and now shafts of sunlight that had broken through the canopy stood gleaming in the way before them like gold spears. She sighed at this, and looked up to the canopy above her, the drape of mossy vines hanging down like hair, the spears of dusty gold light trembling. It was only because she was looking up that she saw it, and she startled him with her cry.

"Look! No, up, look!" Above them was another forest, upside-down, like a mirror. Two giant trees all black and scarred by lightning had fallen, aeons ago, and the wood had grown under them and lifted them, bent and buckled, grown around them, but lifted them all the same, to the very top of the canopy. And now they hung inverted above the creekbed, enormous things hung with moss in long strands, floating like a city above them. The man stilled the horse and they both stared for a while. Birds swung through the city, fluting. The sun lit it from above in a nimbus, like a green warship seen from deep underwater. She couldn't look away.

_I suppose the children of the forest thought that was heaven, because they didn't know any better. _She ran her fingers through the end of her braid, her eyes tearing a bit from the bright nimbus. _Heaven might be like that, anyway, another world above you the same as yours, but instead everything is beautiful. _There was no mud in the canopy; no silt, no fog, only swaying vines and birds and the great hollow twin trees with their roots to the sky.

"No one's been through here for some time," the man rasped above her, "I wonder how long the creek's been dry. We'll stay in it tonight, I think." She assented and the horse began again in its slow ramble. They picked up the creek for an hour or so as it wound north, seeing no one, watching the green tunnel expand and contact. At one point the bed dipped and turned rocky and they dismounted and led the horse. Sansa, walking, found a rock that had a fern painted inside of it, somehow, a black feathery outline, but it was too heavy to bring along and so she left it behind, and was pained. She asked the Hound who he thought had made it, but he shrugged at her and told her that things make themselves. She chewed over that until the bed went silty again and they could ride.

The sun dipped and the tunnel went shadowy, and so they found an inlet that was mossed but dry and built a small fire in its walls. The burning wood smelled salty and the smoke hung low in the inlet inside the night fog, and made everything she saw turn grey and pearled, and the Hound unpacking the horse looked like a ghost. He wandered away for a while, and when he returned she did as well, and she found she wasn't afraid of the dark brush at all. As she walked back towards the inlet she saw it glowing like a cauldron in the black sea of the creekbed and the Hound's shadow moving tall against the trees, and she was glad for no reason she could name.

From the bag bought at the inn came cured beef in fist-sized chunks and cheese that smelled unpleasant but was delicious and buttery in her mouth, and wine. The man gave her some, laughing as she dealt with the unwieldy skin, and then she was considerably warmer inside. She pulled her cloak around her and put her slippers to the fire, and watched it popping and sparkling through half-closed eyes.

"Do you think that the children of the forest knew about heaven?"

The man put down the wineskin and regarded her; he, too, was sprawled out, but lying opposite her, and his face was mostly shadowed.

"No. Why would they?"

"Well–" she was struggling with her thoughts, which were sluggish; she was comfortable, and warm inside from the wine, "because, the way those trees were. They had to have–Don't you think that they thought they'd go somewhere when they died, if they were good?"

"Why would they need to go anywhere?" He yawned and tossed something into the fire. "And who says that they were good? Good doesn't exist in the forest. Good was only made by people, you know. Like your septa, and you saw what happened with that." He laughed to himself and leaned over to her with the skin.

The wine wasn't pleasant, exactly, more sour than sweet, but neither was it bad. She handed it back to him after, her throat warm. "You don't want to go to heaven, do you?"

He laughed, raspier, holding the cut still with a palm. "Oh, I do, of course. A white horse to ride, and I'll be just like the Knight of the Flowers, and here's what I'll do all day, in heaven. First of all–" His eyes had narrowed and he was starting to shudder again with merriment; she broke in before he could finish.

"That's awful, don't. And you saved him from your brother, anyway."

He sobered, still palming the cut. She watched his face go wooden. "No. That was– that wasn't what that was." His eyes had narrowed to slits.

"You saved him because he was _good," _she drew the cloak tighter around her shoulders, "and your brother is _evil_." The fire popped between them; they were both silent for some time while he drank.

Finally he crossed his arms over his chest and cleared his throat. His face was still wooden but she saw the well flickering behind his eyes; she had almost forgotten that it was there.

"Is it all that simple for you, little bird? How easy it must be. Did you ever realize that Loras won with a trick? He did. His mare was in heat, he'd planned it well. Your pretty knight cheats; tell me, how sweetly does that rose smell now? Is that what you find to be _good_? And my brother, did the _gods _make my brother? Is it good that I would kill my brother, because he's evil? And when I do kill him, does _this _disappear as well?" He pointed to the plate of scar, and she saw it shuddering with the force of the well. "Is everything _fair, _then, and I ride away to heaven on my white horse?" He spat, suddenly, and looked away, scowling into the wood. She saw the muscles under his scar writhing as he clenched and unclenched his jaw.

She didn't like the well, but she understood it, and she wasn't afraid of it any longer. Hadn't she seen her own father's legs kicking like a frog's as a black pool poured forth from him and ran thick down the steps? She looked across at the man.

"Nothing is fair, but that doesn't mean you have to _let it. _You stopped him, didn't you; and you brought me here, away from them." She could hardly control the tumbling words; the wine was strong and she felt them pouring out childishly; her eyes had gone hot and for a moment she worried that she might cry in front of him again. But the man's scowl had slid from him and he turned back to stare at her through his slitted eyes. She stared in kind and watched him drink. Time passed and the bird calls of late night began, the low whooping in the trees.

He shook his head and passed the skin to her. It sagged, it was almost empty. His eyes were dark.

"We could keep going, and I could keep you."

_What an odd thing to say. It'd be me kept you, or Robb, anyway. _She frowned at him, confused, but let it go and drank the little that was left of the skin- and that was enough, then, to finish her. She passed it back, her arm heavy. He looked closely at her and then beckoned to her, pulled her pallet from the ledge above and rolled it out beside him. She trudged over, suddenly overwarm and terribly tired, the wood a little wavery at the edges; the pallet was soft from the moss, the sound of the fire almost as good as rain.

Because his shoulder was sore, he slept on his back. She curled against his arm and dreamed vividly of riding the great black horse through crashing waves, a frothing wave surging to the shore. She could feel her hair whipping in the salt wind, feel the other riders racing behind her. She could hear distantly the war drums, pounding from deep inside the surf, pounding hollow in her ears, a perfect echo of her heart.


	23. Chapter 23

In the grey cold of early morning she woke, shaken by tremors running through the arm she lay against. The Hound was dreaming, and shivering, and his hand shook; the other hand fumbled through sleep for the sword beside him. She rose to catch the wrist as it pattered through the loam and stilled it, felt the pulse running fast in it. He blinked awake and lay rigid, looking at her; she watched his vision clear into recognition. He nodded at her, breathed for a moment, shut his eyes again.

She leaned back against the arm and thought of her own dream. It hadn't faded and it hung just behind her eyes; there was still enough wine in her to make vivid the horse underneath her, make the salt spray real. _Had_ she been leading them, leading war? _Where was Robb, then? There was no one before me, only the shore. But I'm going home, and Robb's going home, too- If I ride with any army, it should be his, not the black riders, never them. _Robb's face rose up wavering in her mind, but something had gone wrong with it- longer, cragged; ah, her father. It was comforting. _In a way, Robb now is as my father was. _Her father had died, a desperate unfairness- a hole in the world, and one hand that had pulled at the tear to open it had been hers. Robb could stand for him; Robb, beloved and just, to be the salve. If only she could see his face more clearly in her mind. Would he always look as he appeared now, swirled together with her father? _No. I won't need to look at him with my memory at all; soon I'll be home and he'll be standing before me, real again. _That, too, was comforting; she pressed her cold face into the warmth of the arm and trailed away to sleep.

Even so, even so- she was now standing in the surf, the barren shore at its low tide so far away. She looked down at her skirts floating about her, all laced with seaweed; bubbles were rising before her, and the silt under her feet was giving way. She fell back, her legs splashing through the water and up into the air, wings of droplets, and was caught and held up by the thing rising up through the sea floor. The great head parted the surface of the sea in front of her, green mud sliding from it- _the warhorse_. Once again, she was astride. _Why does it come to carry me? What can it want? _As soon as she asked herself the answer came, bright and clear through the unreality- _It must have a rider; it cannot run alone. _She wound her hand through the mane. _What is_ _this?_ _Do I fear it? _No- it was fearsome, truly, but she had learned its secret: without a rider it had wallowed under the silt of the sea floor, and had eaten its own heart.

The warhorse rose fully from the sea beneath her, mud and sea-ferns sluicing from it; it stamped, and tossed, and trembled there. She reached to pass her hand over the wet poll. _Is it evil? _She couldn't say; it was wild, but evil no longer seemed as clear to her as it had before. _Had it been evil, before, and I changed it by riding it? _No, it was still the same, and would always be- only, she knew its secret now; that was what had changed. She leaned forward to the silky ear and whispered into it.

They rode to the shore, and past it. Over the sand, the high waving dune grass, the grey piles of driftwood; back to the wood, of course, and back to the green warship of heaven that sailed there.

She woke on her own and with a touch of headache at her temples; it was midday and the sun was flooding the inlet. She rose and rubbed her eyes, fixed the braid, looked for the Hound. He'd gone- she could hear no steps in the wood- but the horse was ambling on the ledge, grazing. In the light of day he was only a horse again; great and black, but a horse. She felt foolish. She rose and dug through the bag, and sat on the ledge to eat her honey bread, and hummed, and waited for the Hound to return.

She tried to keep her mind light, concentrated on the sun gleaming on the moss and its beauty, but her thoughts kept dipping back into the night before, and into her dream. It had been so unsettling. She would never choose to ride with Them, but the horse somehow had compelled her. Its wet poll under her hand had been as familiar as the ruff that fringed Lady's throat, and had given her the same pang.

Her thoughts turned to the Hound and what he'd said the night before. If he killed his brother- what would it win him? Something he craved, maybe, but not a face made whole again. Her own face, lovely as it was, wrung approval and smiles from all; she thought of how the gusting laughter had stilled as his scar had entered the inn. He'd had a lifetime of that and there was no repayment for it, even if he killed his brother every night til the end of time. Joffrey's gold curls appeared before her then, pouting. How many nights in her dreams had she stood again on the ledge, and, smiling, turned and shoved hard; in her dreams he fell so fast that he shattered when he hit the flagstones. She _could've _done it, she _would've._ She licked the honey that smeared her palms, eyes narrowed.

She imagined his death in great detail, sitting there on the ledge and swinging her slippers; she gritted her teeth and sucked honeyed crumbs from her fingers and smiled to herself.

Then a breeze ran low through the creekbed and swung the mossy vines about, and the birds flew from them cackling, and she remembered that she could push Joff every night til the end of time and it would never make her father rise from his stone box. So she sighed to herself and rubbed her sore temples and lay back flat with her arms above her head, and thought over instead the things she'd left behind in her wardrobe at Winterfell, and whether they would fit her, now.

The sun was lovely, seen through the canopy like this. She spread her arms wide, felt the moss dense and resilient under her like fur. Then quiet steps wove through the brush behind her, closer and closer, and the Hound was walking over to her laughing, and telling her she looked like a sacrifice lying there, and handing down to her a fistful of blackberries in a rag.


	24. Chapter 24

She looked up at him from the moss and, smiling, took her gift, and then sat up and swung her feet and ate her blackberries. He fished a round of hard cheese from the bag and came to sit beside her, and, between bites, handed over slices of it from the flat of his knife. She alternated the berries with it, and blinked in the sun. It was brighter than usual, somehow, and the light was going straight through her eyes and sitting behind them.

"Do you have a headache, too?"

He answered her with his mouth full. "Every morning. Now you know." She nodded with solemnity at this adult tribulation, and he choked himself laughing. "Don't shake your head at me. You're as bad, you wouldn't wake and I gave up trying. It's later than I wanted." He shrugged, and chewed. "We can get half the day, maybe, if we stay the creek. We'll start earlier tomorrow. The days are getting shorter, can you tell?"

"No, the nights are longer, that's what happens. Because of winter." She frowned at him for being wrong, but he only laughed harder, and tearily agreed, and handed her another slice. She took it and ate and looked him over. His hair was damp and so was his tunic; it was the tunic he'd worn the morning before, but the slit had been crudely laced back together and the stain washed out somewhat. He was chewing and grinning at nothing, and squinting in the sun. She touched his shoulder.

"Where did you go, that you washed?"

He pointed with the knife to the slope of rushes to their left. "Past there, it's a spring, not much. And it's like ice, but should you want it," he stopped, and looked at her, frowning, "go now, and I'll wait." So she did, and while she was squatting in the icy trickle and shivering, she looked down in the clear sun at her thin body covered in prickles, and her skinny legs with their bruises and bites, and her pale halfway-grown chest with its bumps and its ribs and wondered at herself, that she should be alone and naked in the woods like this, and be not particularly afraid. _Like any animal. How has this happened to me? _She peered at her face in the water. There was sunburn across the bridge of her nose, and her hair was wild even in its braid. Her tummy felt hard; she pressed at it and tried to count how long it had been since she had bled from there. _Like an animal, that, too, _she thought, pressing; _it's like the gods made us most of the way into people, and then forgot to finish some things. Such indignity._ She rose and gingerly stepped out, shivering, and dried herself. There was a moment after she stepped onto the dry sand and before she had her dress on again, when, had there been anyone to see her standing there pale and wild-haired and feral, they would've ducked away, frightened by the wood-queen. But there was no one, only birds, and then her dress was on and she was humming her way back up the slope, glad that her headache was going, and glad that she'd had a bath.

In her absence the Hound had woken the horse from his doze and packed him, and he nodded at her clean, sun-reddened face and lifted her up, and they began again through the tunnel.

Beautiful, beautiful in the creekbed. Wetter now; there were more birds, and ferns. The horse walked slowly, taking his time through the reeds. She felt warmer towards him after her dream, and the rhythm of his steps comforted her. How odd, that this ambling creature was also the beast that had crushed men as it carried her through the Iron Gate. Her dream–how is it that she had ridden with Them, when she was not one? And she wasn't one, she was certain of that. The men in the clearing had tried to scratch away the gilt arms from their shields, from their plate, and now she knew why. She'd thought hard about that glint, and the bitterness she'd felt before had melted away. The gilt–_ All the courtesies I was taught, all __the songs of chivalry-so brittle, but not worthless, I was wrong. They stand for the best part of men, even though men fail them. The gilt is important and needs to be fought for, even if you lose. _She'd seen the black riders so clearly in her dreams. Black armour, black mounts, and when she'd looked behind each helm–black beyond black, darkness and unfathomable void. Not a single glimmer, not one brushstroke of light, just nothing at all. _No cause, no hope; they ride endlessly with no banners, with empty shields. _The gilt- how brave to wear it in spite of the black wave advancing, in spite of the horses roaring in on their sea; to stand and wear the gilt anyway, as you were being crushed. _Perhaps the only thing that keeps you from becoming a rider is the gilt._

With these thoughts she had forged herself a dagger, very rare and very very sharp, but she was unaware of it; later on, she would kill with it, equally unaware.

Hours passed, and the sun was in its full slanting glow, a hundred thousand spears of dusty gold shooting through the trees at them. They talked lazily, and the Hound, yawning behind her, scratched at his scarred throat. The little rasp-rasp was close in her ear. _Does it itch? _She only had one; it was on her knee from when she'd fallen on the stair because of Arya, and she hated it, but he was a man. _Lots of men have scars; it shows that they've been brave. It's not really the scar he's so angry about. If it came from war, he'd brag about it the way he brags about being strong. No, not the scar–he's angry because his brother is a monster and no one cares. _She thought about how he'd knelt before her in the field, and how naked his eyes had been when he told her about the toy knight. It was clear in her mind; _scared all the while, he'd said._ _Why did he want to tell me about it? Was it so that I would understand about Joff? _She shook her head to herself, and she felt the Hound's chin brush against her hair as he looked down. "What?"

"Nothing, nothing," she said, distracted. _No, it was because he had no one else to tell. _She couldn't admit yet, out loud, how she'd run down the steps to Cersei; but the memory crawled in circles in the very bottom of her mind, scraped around with its claws. _Saying it will let it out and I'll feel better, but I can't say it, because then I will hear it aloud and Father might too, wherever he is. _She sighed. _The Hound told me for comfort, so that it'd stop scraping him. I wonder if it worked. _She leaned and stroked the horse, absently, and watched the wood slide by. The bed had shallowed out and they were higher, now, only a little lower than the forest floor.

She felt the Hound's breath catch and looked over, followed his gaze. Parallel to them and up the slope rose an old stone wall, overgrown with vine, and behind it in the distance jutted a great wheel, also overgrown, its rotting planks stilled and wreathed in moss and vine. She felt him breathe out hard, the bellows jolting her, and tense, and then the horse was scrambling up quick out of the bed, and they looked past the wall..

The creek had forked at one point in the past, and here lay a second bed, parallel, just as deep, but now dried and crowded full with waving rushes and ferns, and at its side was a dark, hulking stone building. It was conical and the thatch, long fallen away, made it open at the top; it looked to her a sunken castle so long in the mud that only the tower could be seen, but it was a watermill, and it was very, very old.

The Hound, unspeaking, tied the horse and lifted her down; glowing in his eyes was the same faraway boyishness as he'd had with the nest. He picked up a stick and beckoned to her, and together they went to the mill.

Rabbits bounded from their steps; jays, glossy blue and angry, followed them shouting. He walked in front to part the way, swinging the stick, and she dawdled behind with her skirts and hummed. The trees fencing each side of the bed were tall and lovely and ancient, a double row with their sky canopy blooming in late-summer deep green. She looked at the coats of velvet moss reaching high up the bark and stopped for a moment, staring at the moss, and dropped her skirts, and clasped her hands behind her back. The Hound heard the pause and turned around. She looked at him standing tall and dark against the reeds, and she chose again, and picked up her skirts and followed.

Seen close, it was a mountain of vine and beautiful, and quiet as a hidden tomb. She followed the Hound up the steps. The door was gone, had fallen ages ago to a mound of pulpy shards in the sill. She passed the archway; it _was _lovely. The open roof let in an enormous dazzling column of gold that shot all way down through the circular hole that had rotted out in the center of the planking floor that they were standing on, and to the very bottom of the mill, a story below. She peered down through the hole; she could see a dirt floor at the bottom, and a smaller room with things–sacks, it looked like, piles of old sacking. Birds and dust were swirling in the column of gold. Stone steps, hugging the wall, led down; they looked crumbly, and were heaped with rotted thatch. The Hound tested them gingerly, and then nodded at her, and she followed him down.

Then they were in the bottom of the wheelhouse and he was climbing around the scraps of oak scaffold that had once worked the wheel and was talking to himself, and was oblivious to her, and so she left him to himself and wandered through a small archway to where she had glimpsed the sacking. It was darker there; the column of gold glow that came from the open roof only barely touched the room. She stood in the center and waited for her eyes to clear in the dim. One circular window, long glassless, gave on the waving reeds outside; they were a few steps below ground level. The floor was ancient damp packed clay, shiny in the middle, but mossy in the corners with the fine grey velvet moss of an undercroft, and there were the musty bags piled up against the wall in a great heap, and on the floor near them, a yellow bowl with crumbs in it. _How odd; here, like a child's bowl, but no one lives here, and yet it has crumbs, breadcrumbs. _Little yellow bowl, bright spot against the grey, like a festival prize. She looked at the bowl and stepped forward, bent to it.

She had just picked it up when, leaning forward, she saw from the corner of her eye the hand extending from the largest bag. A boy's hand, fresh and young like hers, but with the fingernails all torn and broken back. She dropped the bowl, but her empty hand hung there, hung there–because she could see clearly now in the dim, and the hand in the bag hung still as well, and the arm, and down below the arm, there in the dark of the bag, was the face–and the _face_…

Then there were hard hands around her ribs. The Hound was pulling her against him and she was choking, pointing, trying to tell him, but the words wouldn't come. And then he was bending against her, and she was caught in the curl of his body; his hand went behind her knees and he lifted her up, muttering something, and held her against his chest. She put her arms around his neck and hid her eyes tight against the scarred throat, and he carried her back up the stairs, two at a time.


	25. Chapter 25

When they had come through the doorway of the mill and were again in the tall ferns of the creekbed, the Hound bent to set her on her feet, but instead she clenched her arm tight around his neck. He sighed and carried her back down the slope through the reeds to where the horse waited.

He walked slowly and lowered her down slowly, and let her test her legs. By then the loud roar in her ears had faded and her vision was whole again instead of the small dim circle it had been, and she could stand. And she stood, wavering, with her hand on his shoulder.

She didn't want to cry; she'd seen a terrible, desperately unfair trap with a terrible poor thing caught in it, and it was not _crying _she felt like. She stood and looked at the mill. It hadn't been _sad_, it had been…

Once a short, quiet man with no teeth had come and her father had bought two new dogs from him. Hunting dogs, red ones, and they were sleek, with wet brown eyes and had licked her hands. But when they'd been let into the kennel, they'd fought wildly with the others, and she'd watched as the crazed, roaring ball of snarls and limbs had rolled around the kennelyard**.** _That _was what she felt like doing. She could feel the ball of snarls tumbling up her throat. They had a metallic taste and a strength behind them and she knew, suddenly and perfectly, why the Hound had been shaking when he'd walked up to the men in the clearing. Anger gave her vision an odd clarity. She stared wordlessly at the grey eyes, and he stared back, and an understanding hummed between them.

"A bad thing, that," he said, simply, and brushed his knuckle against her trembling jaw.

She leaned against the knuckle. There had been something wrong with the face in the mill, something beyond her experience. The boy was dead, but it was not simply death that she'd seen; the boy was of the wood, but his face had been nothing natural. Something had touched him, something unlike a beast, something unlike the men in the clearing; something that lives on pain. In the boy's torn mouth had been a tunnel, deepest black, and far in the tunnel was another face looking back at her.

"Who did it?"

He shook his head. "Someone that… well, someone that had left when they heard us. How much of that thing did you see?"

She looked at him, looked away for a moment while she decided, and then took his eyes again and said, "His hand."

The man sighed, and nodded, and turned his gaze back towards the mill, watching, squinting. She breathed. _A monster hiding with a bowl of bread, everywhere; the world is full of traps. When will they stop hunting me, when will I stop being sold back and forth? How cruel, to be sold for only a bowl of bread… _Sansa felt, alongside the anger, a fierce wave of gratitude, standing there in the reeds beside the man and his horse; there was the _world_, and she was still alive. How easy it'd have been to fall into the trap–take the bowl, hungry for the boon, never see the creature in the corner, not even know to _look_. Instead she was alive, and standing in the sun. She went on her toes and, stretching, pecked the cheek that was turned away from her; a peck delivered with all the clumsy solemnity of a child's kiss. The man, laughing at the kiss, patted at her; patting her shoulder he also turned it, and pushed her gently to face away from the mill.

He'd seen the ferns moving, over by the old wheel; something being dragged. He put her on the horse and led them away.

They rode. The sun slanted down. They stayed in silence 'til the creekbed, fed from underground, went to mud and the horse sunk in the silt and refused to walk. As she sat there, she felt them sinking down, all three of them, inch after inch, and it was the opposite of her dream, a black mirror; terrifying. She leaned forward to put her arms around the horse again and pushed her cheek into his warm dusty neck. The Hound snorted at her panic and dismounted, led the horse out to the solid ground at the bank. He looked up to her eyes then and saw the disquiet, and pulled her down, and sat beside her on the bank.

"Are you hungry?"

"No. Is this how the whole world is?"

He shrugged. "Most of it. Not all. Sometimes it only depends on where you stand."

That bothered her as much as when he'd said _things make themselves_ about the painted rock; it was impossible. There was good, and bad; no matter where she stood, the boy in the bag was a bad thing, a thing so bad that she was surprised the world hadn't fallen down. The _face_, how it glowed in her mind. The mouth had been open; he had died with words still in his mouth**,** he had died calling out and nothing had come for him but a bag. Not only that–not only that; hadn't there been, as her eyes focused, for just a breath, another face? Like a dream, like a memory. She had been pulled back before she had seen it in full. There was a nagging feeling in her that, had she looked a moment longer, she would've heard a whisper in her ear–the Stranger, come to tell her the truth. She shuddered.

The man, with slow deliberation, moved to lean his arm against her, just enough that she was aware of it; she let him lean, and she looked at the line of mud where it had crept up the fetlocks of the horse. _A sinking ship._

_No, no, don't think that; Robb's fighting a war. I can fight, too, I can be as brave. I won't sink. The monster is back there, I'm here, I've gone so far. I'm too old now to be afraid. _Still, the fear stayed fluttering in the core of her, and she was grateful for the solidity of his arm, and she pressed against it. They sat for a while, leaning, and let the horse graze away his balkiness, and then he lifted her back up and they rode in the gold afternoon, keeping to the dry side of the bank.

She wanted to keep riding and knew the want to be irrational. _It stays in the mill, it's not following us._ But there were so many more, all wearing different masks, and she felt safe up on her horse. Some time later, the Hound pulled to a stop in a break, she laid her hand on his arm and said, "Not here." He nodded against her crown. It was drawing into darkness, cobalt in the west, when he stopped again; she hadn't needed to explain herself.

He left her by the horse and went out to hunt, and she watched the stars. How beautiful, the way they slid out into the sky as it grew darker; first the brightest ones, now the wide blanket of glitter spreading out over her, dull ones, flickering ones, glowing fires. Her father, as clear and sharp as if he was beside her again with his beloved careworn face, telling her about them. She'd loved them because they were beautiful, she'd loved her father's voice, all the old stories that explained why they moved up there, so far away. _They chase each other up there, just like people do, down here._

The Hound came back with one hare, rueful, and said, "Too dark," by way of apology. She'd not minded; her stomach was unsteady and she was more grateful for the fire and the man's rambling talk than for her small dinner. She watched his hooded eyelids as he turned the spit. His coughing in the smoke, his hand dropping into hers the greater portion, his slow crooked smile–it was all as familiar now as her home had been. She listened to the wind rolling through the high canopy.

It was after they ate and they were sitting across from the fire in their usual way that she put her chin on her knee, and looked at him. There was something that needed to be said; time was getting short.

"You killed a boy, too."

He looked up at her from his polishing and, mirroring her without thinking, sat his chin in his hand.

"Arya's friend. You know."

He nodded. "And you're thinking to yourself, now, that it may not be any different."

She stared at him. He nodded again and leaned back, crossed his arms over his chest; looked at her from the shadows made by the hollows of his eyes and gaunt cheek. He cleared his throat.

"When I was your age, I went out to war, I think I told you that. Fought, in a way, aside your own father, although I didn't give a shit about that. I was no older than you, I was a boy killing men. Then I became a man, and killed boys, and other men. Hundreds of them, probably; you know whose company you're in. I've not lied." He shifted. "But what was in the mill–what _that_ is… Don't you see the difference?"

She nodded; she did see. _Yes, yes, but do you? A monster hides in that mill, and he put the boy in the bag. A monster did that because that is all it loves, because it eats pain. You don't eat pain, you eat nothing at all, really, and I'm sorry for that. You're not a monster–but the boys die; how is that? _She looked at the man across from her, really looked, and picked away at the knot._ His brother eats pain. The Hound… he kills, but not for pain; for some other reason, to cover over some other thing, some helplessness_**. **_He decided he would fight it and he never stopped. _She understood, dimly; she, too, felt the helplessness inside herself, and the urge to run away from it. The boy in the bag; she had seen inside his open mouth and knew it was a tunnel into a world below, and it was dark, dark, dark. Would her eyes someday get so tired of it all that they would fail to see the difference? Somewhere back there, slinking around the mill, was the thing that had done that to the boy, and it walked on two feet like a man, but it wasn't one. And no one had made the monster, it made itself–a mistake, godless; it was true: evil is real. She clenched her jaw. It didn't matter; she would grip hard on the gilt; if she had to she would put it in her mouth and swallow it. She would _keep _it.

She turned her eyes away from the tunnel and back to the Hound. He'd frightened her before, when she was young, but now she thought she saw how simple it all was. He had half of a face, and he was half a rider. He'd hidden in her bed, but he'd pulled the Stranger from her body; he'd had her make a net but then he'd let her open it. Too much ash had covered his armour, made it black; the problem was that he'd forgotten that it was only ash.

Sansa looked at him in his shadow. "You _like_ killing. You told me."

"I do." He shrugged. "And I like being alive."

_Confusing. But it's true. _She made a decision then, because of the blackberries, and the bite, and her feeling for him, which was nameless but strong.

"You can't," she paused, girded herself; "be both, though."

"Be both of what? Alive, and kill others? That's the wheel the world turns on, and nowhere more than here," he spread a hand out to the wood, "and you know that. Piety's for shit."

"No," she shook her head at him. _I know that. I don't mean about the killing, it's the hating; the wrong is in the hate. _She sighed, and told him. "No. I meant–you can't be on both sides at once. You have to choose."

He laughed short and sharp; he opened his mouth and she knew he was going to mock her simplicity, but it _was_ simple, and so she interrupted him. "You can't be yourself, and also–" it was awful, but couldn't be softened, "be like your brother."

His face went wooden and he turned it away, and he was silent for some time. When he turned back he was wretched. "I _burned_," he said, and his voice was unlike she'd ever heard it, the gravel bottoming out, shaking with it, raw. She looked in him and through him to the well, saw the shadow of the boy he'd once been and the desperate burden that it was. _Yes, you burned, and you never knew how to put it out. Things make themselves, you said, but then somehow that scar made you. _Oddly, this hurt her. He was done speaking after that; she didn't press. She rose and went to sit beside him, and leaned against him, and watched, through the small pocket in the canopy, the great and terrible wheel of stars.


	26. Chapter 26

He finally rose and cleared his throat and brought her pallet to her without speaking, and laid his down beside her, and put his arm over his eyes. She laid hers out and sat on it and watched the remains of the fire smoldering its way out. She scooped loam over the coals and then laid her hands on the warm loam for a while, and then crawled into her pallet, shivering. She could tell from his breathing that he was awake.

"I'm sorry," she said into the dark, although she wasn't, and it had been necessary. Necessary, too, was the apology, she decided.

She felt the Hound stir, his pallet scratching at the loam. He moved, and she felt his heavy hand pass over the back of her neck and press slightly, trace under her chin, and pull away. The touch was coarse without meaning to be and ingenuous without meaning to be, and in it was the distillation of his feeling for her. She felt it there on her neck long after he'd laid his hand back down, long after his breathing slowed with sleep.

_I could keep you, _he'd said. And she'd be kept forever; just like the swirling knot of dead men that had held her up–they'd held her up, true, but they'd held her all the same. Her father–she'd disobeyed him; but, after all, he'd _sold _her, to _Joffrey_. She squirmed a bit in her pallet, and the Hound, cold, shifted closer.

She thought of her sister, then, just a flash of her face, running, tense and determined. The moss high on the trees on the way to the mill had faced away from her, and when she'd leaned against the horse and watched the stars, her father's voice had been so clear, just as the North star above her, and the way. _We turned. We've been turned for some time. The creek distracted me, it is so beautiful, but it turns and he knew it. _She looked at the dark shape beside her. _He lied, finally. Do they all? Not North. I don't know where he would be taking me–somewhere he thinks he can hide me, and no one would ever find us. _For a moment, there was an uncertainty inside her, a sort of hurt; she thought she knew why he wanted to keep her–she was a warm shield against the cold in the well. She shoved the thought away; she was very young, and it was easier. _I need to go home. I never thought he would lie_**.**

Sansa had, in her brief and glittering near-royalty, been seated once near the stand of musicians, just beside them, as she ate. It was a treat for her. Each note so close to her, and each note a glowing _pop_ like the embers in the cavernous fireplace of Winterfell, but much better. The hands like birds all over the harps and each _pop _melting into the wave sliding over her, and she'd forgotten to chew for a while, she'd sat with tart in her mouth. But then she'd heard something else–at times, when a bow had slid, there had been a rough dragging, a rasping. A haggard indrawn breath before the notes. Underneath the notes. She could hear it because she was close; the other ladies only heard the high lovely wave. After she was back in her room, it was not the notes but the rasping that had echoed in her ears, and she now, remembering it, felt a curious, weary disappointment that each song needed a second quiet, harsh song to birth it._ Things hidden under things. Where could he want to go?_

It occurred to her then that she had never asked him that most important question–what he planned to do now that he was free. Her heart slowed in her. _His brother would be simple to find._

Equally simple was her decision; she thought she knew now where they were going. She rose quietly to stand in her pallet. The moon was bright. Standing beside him, she willed for him to wake–sometimes he got up in the night–and he didn't. She walked very slowly to get her bag, slid her pallet into it silent, and stroked the cold dozing muzzle of the horse, silent. In the brush, she took from the bag bought at the inn half of the remaining bread; with guilt, she hesitated and put four of the lumps back. _It could be that this was why he had me make the net; maybe he knew the whole time that I would leave. _The net was an awful thing. She would try her best to delay its use. She thought of leaving him the gold brooch for its value, but couldn't make herself take it off; she'd become fond of the little leaf-masked face. There was nothing else to give, and for a moment that thought shook in her throat. _I have nothing, really, but me. _She bit through a lock of her hair and tied the soft red threads into a loose knot. Bending to put the knot in his bag she saw the stained white cloak and so, hands shaking, she grabbed it up and bundled it to her._ I can wear it under my dark one. _In the moonlight, the wool was a pale glow in her hands. _He left it for me once, and then he took me. Now I'm taking it and leaving him. The world is upside-down, like he said. I wish so much he hadn't lied. _She left the knot where the cloak had been.

At the edge of the clearing she looked for a while at the outline of the sleeping man until she felt a new and singular heaviness in her chest, and turned away. She shouldered her bag and bunched up her skirts and the white cloak high, and took light steps to enter the brush, and because she was careful she made no sound.

The wood, ever desirous of its beloved ones, opened itself for her to enter and then closed behind her again, and she was gone.


	27. Chapter 27

It had been late in the night when he went back.

He'd packed his horse in the shadow of the lane as the swarms ran about him; he and the horse were tall above the sea and he didn't notice it. He was drunk and so the horse was hard to pack, it was whirling around him and the bags kept sliding off. He bent down one time too many and lost the wine before he realized it was happening, and retched, and laughed through the retching at the terrible indignity to the horse. When he was done he leaned with his brow at its cold sweat-lathered neck and, laughing, asked it to forgive him. Then it was easier and the bags were on and he was finished and his head was clearer–and so, at that moment, the terrible weight of what he'd lost fell upon him. Everything at once upon him, all that he'd done and all that he'd lost, and he stood with his palm on the bloodsoaked cantle and shut his eyes in the dark.

There was a nagging thought that haunted him always after war; _all this confusion, what if I've died and no one noticed and this is all I get. _Somehow, though, the thought of being dead had now become preferable. But he knew he wasn't dead–he was breathing and the broken ribs hurt, the whole of him hurt; he was wretched, but he was alive.

He leaned for some time with his brow against the patient horse, eyes unfocused, and then led it back to the stable. Then he staggered slow back through the lane, through the screaming clatter, through the gate, pushing men over and out of his way to the stair.

Three stairs, fifteen, and the wall came down and hit him hard in the shoulder. He sat to wait until the writhing pathway of stairs righted itself, and was up again. Then there was the door, and then the green room with the small thing curled tight under his cloak. He held his hand out for it, falling, and just as it faltered, just as he was going to reach down and grab after it, the cold white hand was in his.

She looked up at him. It was very _clear,_ now, the thing he was doing–_different from what I tried before, and the same. _She said in her bell voice, "I won't go with you, I have to wait. Ser Dontos is taking me because you can't; there's a ship…" He blinked at her, and laughed at the cruelty of it all, and watched her face go blank. How to explain to her the truth of her ship? A net sailing into a net; with Cersei as the gleaming figurehead, molten-gold hair whipping the wind, back safe to the same harbor in a laughing loop.

The bag in his hand was, at last, under his control. The things in her chest were ridiculous, but at the bottom was a sturdier layer, likely the dresses she was ashamed of; wools grey and green and brown. Roaring loud in his head was that familiar war-song that sung along with the strain–_you don't need to think; only need to do it. _He turned and looked at her, and she looked at him.

How was it that she knew him well, or was it only that she was growing older? In any case, she almost made it to the door in two leaping bounds before he caught her–a box of feathers, surprising how light–and then she was snarling in his grip, biting through his palm. He gagged her quick and bound the hard little ankles. Her chin was smeared in his blood, her eyes, dark with incrimination, never left his face as he caught her wrists. It was with relief that he slid the bag over her.


	28. Chapter 28

As he came back down the steps, he saw that the clamor had slipped inside the walls, indistinguishable from the battlefield, as is the way of war. Women sobbing and clutching bare breasts, their dresses in shreds at their knees, ribbons falling from their hair; men tearing at each other, a bloodied septa with her hands over her eyes. Men jostled past him, each with his own bag over his shoulder, clanking and jangling, bags of stolen plate and stolen silver. One great bearded goat in a bloodsoaked tunic passed by with a girl over his shoulder and a woman stumbling after him, howling _my only daughter, my only girl. _He strode to the stable past what he knew to be the truth of mankind asserting itself in wild screechings. He thought for a moment on what he'd been told of the hells; fire and depravity, wasn't it? All waiting patiently 'til the moment you die for the great reveal. The reveal shuddered glorious before him now, wreathed in green flame. It did not disillusion him in the slightest. He had seen it firsthand, quite some time ago.

The bag on his shoulder convulsed, and then he felt a wasp in his throat. He stopped. Jutting there from the bag was a golden needle with the tip now red, a golden needle from her hair. He pulled it out from her hard little grip in the bag and looked at it in his palm, and laughed. _Of all the things, a pin. _Men had hacked away at him for hours upon hours, hacking at him with their dying breath, and here was this, the victor, a jeweled pin winking in his palm. He put it in his pocket and patted her, unaccountably pleased.

There was only one good horse left in the stable and it was his, and there was a limping dark-haired man trying for it with the slow soothing movements of a man well versed. He didn't see the Hound coming up behind him, or see the Hound lead his horse past him through the straw.

He sat her down and pulled the bag down from her small ivory face. He didn't like the terror, didn't like her eyes shut tight against him, and so he put his face close to hers.

"Look at me."

She did, then, blinking startled at him, and he slid his cheek against hers and spoke close in her ear to cut through the fog. "We're going to ride, now, and you'll not scream. If you do, I'll just leave you. Do you understand?" She nodded into his neck and he felt her breath hitch. He pulled back and regarded her at arm's length. "If you fall off the horse, you're going to die."

She looked away from him in disdain and he saw with relief that she would do. He put her on the horse and they went out to meet the war.

It was there in the road, and it was a chaos. Men were clamoring below him and a cold shroud of calm slid over him and the world went silent. There was a gash at his brow and his heavy scar pulled down at it, held it open, kept the blood draining into his eye and made it bleary. But the clear calm was still there, and with it the best of him; time slowed. He again noted that mounted battle was much like rowing, simple: a deep duck to the side with the oar, cut back a shallow swing. The sea rose before him screaming and he rowed. The spray was much the same, only hot; he was a young man, armed fully with rage and despair, and so the sea parted for him and fell.

The gate was open and its men had died so long ago that they were already covered by mud, barely visible. He was glad of it and not glad; he could pass through easily now, but it meant that the world was lost beyond recapture. He sighed and bit through the sigh–he'd tasted fear in it. Fear was the true killer, the only real one, and he knew how to keep it at bay: lay it bare and look at it, and crush it with the anger.

The girl tensed at the sight of her knights mashed down in their mud graves and he, leaning, skewered it at her; whispering in the warm white shell of her ear, he felt her droop then, and pulled her back against his chest, felt her heart fluttering in his arm. The horse jostled and sank into the fallen bodies just as the mud, then the gate was beyond them and the Road spread out before them, heaped all over with struggling men; they were lit pale green from the clouds which were low and emerald. He surveyed it with dispassion. _A vipers' nest._

To the left of the Road was the scrubby wood, which men feared. He nudged his horse and it picked off into the bracken and away.

His life had revolved in its wheel; once again, he had run to the wood.

As a young child, he'd been all through the wood of his home, trailing dogs and throwing rocks and listening to the echo of his own voice, but it was only after he had burned that he'd come to value it.

No one had looked at him after. Strangers would stare at him, but all of those he knew would look at some vague point above his head or, sometimes, speak without looking at him at all. Once in a while he would forget the burn and himself, and run about blustering and shouting and waving a stick as he always had. Then the averted eyes would remind him, and he would collect his angry dignity and compose himself. The cook didn't mind his face, but then again, her son had come out with a slit running from his nose to his mouth and he bubbled when he breathed.

The wood, in its terrible simplicity, had welcomed him the same. He was wiry and tough and pragmatic, and it showered him with reward for those things–rabbits, fish, handfuls of gooseberries, honeycombs cracked and dripping, long days of walking and shouting songs to himself and to the dog, long warm drowsy afternoons lying in the moss and dropping helplessly to sleep. He would slink home after dusk late for the dinner and ripe for punishment. After the cold meal and the scolding, he would stand shivering in the barrel that was his bath while the cook scrubbed the dirt from the cracks in his scar with a brush and listened to him ramble about the heroic rabbit that had, after worthy chase, proven unequal to his skill. Then he would go up to his bed. Paramount was that he avoided his brother, who loomed laughing and tall, and awed him not only with a humiliating panic but with the sharp bitter truth that he was vulnerable and that he was alone.

He was older now; he'd forced his way back into the world of men, but it had been injurious and snarling all the way. He'd forgotten the vast comfort of the wood, and he was gratified. The few men running past them had trailed away and all was quiet. He watched the stands of trees go by, pale ghosts in the green dark, and felt the girl relax into sleep in the circle of his arm. He himself had gone beyond weariness into that numb-limbed unreality of exhaustion that is almost pleasant. His broken ribs sang with his breath, but he didn't mind; the weight of what he'd lost was lighter now. His chin fell to her crown and he blinked awake once, twice, a dozen times, and then finally let himself drop fully into the unreality. His eyes stayed half-open, but he dreamed behind them.

The horse floated through the wood, and he went in and out of his dreams. Then the air was crisp again and pine-smelling, the birds were out and it was morning.


	29. Chapter 29

In the morning sobriety cut the world to clear, bit at him, made him look at what he'd done.

He unpacked his horse and looked at the salt burns under the bags and rubbed his jaw. He could see the girl, curled up small where he'd laid her, in the corner of his eye. The Blackwater had loosed his grip on the long hold he'd had on himself; now fear whistled up through the cracks between his fingers and sang to him: _there is nowhere you can go that you will not be found._ He listened for a while and brushed his horse. He agreed with the song, and that was its power. It had been years since he had heard its voice at all, but now it was so clear. _They'll have started_ _after you, and if you fall, she falls. _He dug through the bag and calculated the days. What the fear sang was true, but he had another, colder, honesty that he drew from.

The girl woke and uncurled, and he fed her and sat beside her to watch her eat; then he gave her a pallet. He walked away into the brush and crouched and waited while she made her decision. She sat with her auburn hair shining, staring down at the pallet, and then slowly crumpled down to it. Her fists relaxed with sleep and, assured that she wouldn't run, he leaned back against the tree with the sun warm on his sore legs and dozed. Later he woke, groggy, and hunted and fed her again, and over the firelight, saw her laugh.

As a boy, he had abandoned his home and become a squire, and in the time that his duties hadn't taken, he had watched avidly the men who awed him. He'd squinted from the side of the yard, and watched all of it, their movements as they trained in the yard in the mornings, their mannerisms. At first, his presence had been unremarked, but he was tall, and he'd tried his hardest. Soon his unquestioning efficiency had won him the stability he'd craved. Later, he'd found that they wanted another thing that was also in him, and that, too, he had provided. It came from inside him and it was the best and worst of him, it led him, and protected him; he had become a man in those years and also something else.

Once in the yard, training–he'd been a boy, twelve or so, gangly and pouring sweat, the heat dropping sparks of light behind his eyes–the master-at-arms had leaned back and held up a palm and laughed, telling him through his laughter_, you can stop getting back up, it's too hot and I want a drink._ But he had gotten up and gotten up again, kept crawling back up, over and over through the years. The thing that was inside him was simple and knew only to survive, and it had.

Watching the fire, looking over at the girl, he felt the forgotten weakness pounding in his chest. He had spent so long hunting at the request of his queen, and then of his boy-king, that he hunted in his dreams. Now he sat in the woods, and for the second time in the wheel of his life he saw that he had taken something beyond him and it was he who would be hunted. The weakness sang. He wondered if the girl could hear it.

He rose and kicked over the fire and walked through the brush to his sleeping horse, leaned his face against him, and breathed in the warm dusty salt smell of him. The girl made soft noises behind them, pulling herself into her blanket. He wasn't at all sure if he'd done the right thing; his compass spun with the fear and so he asked instead of the other thing inside him, the thing with its always-bared teeth; its breath was cold as it answered. The horse's pulse was strong and slow against his brow. He felt the terror guttering like a candle; he felt the cold creep in over it. He ran his hand down the muzzle and walked back to his pallet.

In the dark, he looked over to the girl sleeping beside him. Her outline was very small; her breath was coming rapid with her dreams. The smell of scrub pine was sharp. _The further North, the denser the wood. Let them come._ Lying there, he took hold of the fear in his mind, then took up the memory of the blood in his mouth and let them at each other, and when the fear was crushed, he fell asleep.

He woke to birds loud above them; the sky was silver-grey and clean in his lungs, and he spat the sleep out of his mouth and stretched in his pallet. In the night, the weakness had changed itself. It had become a fuel inside of him.

He reached into the girl's blanket and pressed her wrist to wake her, waited while she trailed out into the wood. She came back and sat behind him and watched him pack; when he turned around, she was looking at him with her eyes wide.

"The water's in this. Here, do you want it? Are you hungry?" She hesitated and then acquiesced, held her hands out for her bread. He liked the way she stood when he went to lift her to the horse–her face tilted away, expectant and remote, composed, as if she were lifting herself.

Then the woods were slipping past them, made bright with slanting light, and the final shreds of his anxiety slipped away with them. They rode through the day. The slants of light had revolved on their points when the horse broke through a thicket and dropped down to the low bank of a creek. Birds scattered in waves from them, swooping in a whirl around the lean fisherman standing there in the creek, wet to the thigh and silent. His gaunt face pointed down at the water, but his eyes rose to meet the Hound's, transfixed. The Hound grinned down at the trembling man as they passed, pulling the grin up wide into a snarl, and the eyes faltered and dropped back down to the water.

When they had regained the trail, the girl tipped her crown back against his chest and looked up at him.

"Why didn't he run from us? He wanted to."

"We could go back and you can ask him."

She shook her head, and he snorted.

The wood grew darker by slow degrees and soon she was shifting fretfully; he pulled her back against him and she wilted, and dozed, her head nodding against his shoulder with the jolting gait of the horse. He watched for a clearing and let his mind turn inward and down. Very clear was the distinction between what he was and what he now asked of himself; he went past it and further down. Waiting at the bottom was the cold pool of resolve. He took his fill. It was not depleted; it was endless.


	30. Chapter 30

The moon was a sliver. Their clearing was dark and close, hung with a familiarity lent by the fire, by the shared meal and by the trickiness of the wood itself.

She sat across from him. Her shock had turned to resignation and then that, too, had turned in the nimble resilience of her youth; or perhaps it was her character. She appraised him now, cocooned in her cloak, and he waited for her to speak.

"Joff would never have let you go. Did he know?"

It wasn't the question he'd expected; he laid the blade down and looked at her.

"He does now." _If he lives. _

"You just left? I think he'll be so angry, though." The shadow of the fire gave her mouth's edge the faintest tilt.

"I left, no matter. I would again."

"No one told me what he is, and he looked–well, he looked so–" The tilt flickered and dipped down: chagrin. _Looked well, yes, that's the pity. And caught you, poor little bird; you were caged before you knew it. I saw the home you came from, a song in itself; no wonder you were so unaware. Not like some, who run to their traps and count themselves __lucky_. It was humid on the day his liege called for him to be handed over to his daughter. He'd combed his hair and put on the neat red doublet, and sweated under it. A wet heavy pall sat over the courtyard and the stable flies, agitated by the storm, had swarmed up in a whirl, biting at them as they passed. He'd walked behind the men, and thought of Gerion's face on hearing the command–the laughing eyes gone narrow, the thin iced-gold face speculative for a moment.

He'd waited outside the heavy door of the bedchamber for a long time, and then it opened silently on its hammered brass disc; it was cool inside and smelt of orange flowers. She'd looked at his hands first, at the split in his right knuckle, then brought her head up, looking full in his face, and held the look, unblinking. There was an assuredness to her gaze, and if he were honest with himself, beauty girded with regality. He'd averted his eye, disconcerted by that imperious green. Later he'd averted his eye again and again, and obeyed, earning his title. It had taken a long time for the green facade to drop, and then he understood her better. _Imperious and filthy._

One morning, some time after the wedding, Robert had come blaring back from wherever he'd been, trailing laughing men and a haze of stink–rut and vitality. He himself had remained vigilant for this on instruction; so, hearing the roar, he'd knocked after Cersei. A bout of busy handmaids came first and then the Queen, radiant in her own haze. She'd powdered heavily all the way to the hollow of her throat, and he'd looked down at the soft mask as she swept past. She had her toothsome grin and on her unpowdered shoulder, a spot she'd missed, a pale bruise blooming from the grip; perfect fingerprints, plum shadows. He'd looked away. In the dining hall, she'd pressed the chilled rim of her glass to her lips and watched, past Robert's head, the man who entered the hall, all easy grace and grin; her mirror. Then the first child came, a boy like a golden torch, and she held him up proud and shining, and no one had said a word.

"Did you care for him at all?" Sharp, that. _You're asking yourself, now, as well as me. Did you care for him at all, or was it only that you'd heard a song once?_

The girl's quiet company was a welcome thing. They talked for some time, her soft voice meshing with the calls from the canopy, and then the talking wound down into silence. The girl, lost in her thoughts, traced around in the dirt. Her lowered eyelids shone in the firelight above her matted lashes. The fire's thin spear of smoke wavered between the two of them on its way to the canopy. He stretched himself out. When he opened his eyes again, the pit had gone to coals and the girl was asleep in her little cocoon, her cheek dragging on her knee. She stumbled as he walked her to her blankets. He waited for the sound of her breath slowing and fell into his sleep like a tunnel.

Then it was dawn, white-blue and fresh. A trio of starlings swept over the clearing, cackling and trilling; he packed the horse, and the girl piped at him and ate her bread, her little face tilted away as he lifted her, and they rode.

"You saw my brother Robb, do you remember? Yes. He's brave, he was always the bravest of us. There was a _rat_ once in my trunk, in with all of my things. No, listen. And Robb, he…" and the morning went on in its blur of sundappled green.

"And I knew that my mother wouldn't mind all too much, but I asked anyway, and she said…"

The thicket became more dense, and streams broke through the brush, heading out to the sea. A worn path started up before them, a little furrow, not a game trail–the unmistakable regularity of man. He followed it, guarded, and before them was a turf hut like a mushroom rising up out of the loam, dark and earthen-smelling. Domestic, with its heavy black thatch and its little briar gate; and its log trough, with the trough empty, the yard empty, the door open; a dusty cup lying in the open doorway, a hollow blackness in that open door. The girl tensed. It didn't take long to decide; he would know what would be following after them.

The doorway was low, he had to stoop.

As he entered he heard the rattling breath, and he stood 'til his eyes accustomed to the dark. In the sloping corner was the bed with the man and his wife twisted together on it, naked in their fever, her head on the man's chest, dry mouths open, the eyes bright on him, but past caring, the breathing wet with drowning lungs. He stepped back, and then saw the cot at the foot of the bed and a child lying in it gone hard, its mouth in rictus.

In the summer of his ninth year, loathful of his home and of the stilted conversation of his father, he had taken to prowling around into the shaggy thicket outlaying the village. One afternoon, a column of smoke and a great cry of voices had come from the brush as he neared it. Closer, he'd seen the cause: a thatch house, sun-bright and shuddering with flame, and outside of it a woman screaming, held back by two men, and all the common people standing round with their hands over their mouths. His legs had gone shaky as he ran from there, and his throat was dry. Later, listening from behind the door to the cook, he'd learned that this is what is done when the sickness begins.

He went out quick back to the girl, and was grateful for the solidity of his horse under him as he carried them away from there, and, less consciously, for the smell of her unwashed hair warmed by the sun, and of all the world of living things, to which he still belonged.


	31. Chapter 31

It was a narrow mossy rift in the wood that he chose, and the girl settled beside him at the fire. They ate thick slices of sharp cheese and cured pork. She, brushing a loose strand of hair from her eyes, wiped a stripe of pale ash on her cheekbone.

"Is there any more? Oh, thank you." Her cupped hands held out under his looked like white shells, lit from below by the fire.

The palisade of mossed trunks and the low coals brought again that warm illusion of enclosure, but he was not comforted. The cottage stuck in his mind. War was an endless violent sea and a constant of his life. He had never thought to question it, but he could feel now within himself the ache of change, an unexplained tremor, and he was unsettled.

"Here. Are you still hungry?"

She shook her head and yawned behind her wrist, then stretched her thin arms out to the fire, wrapped herself up. They sat in silence, hers calm. Some time later, he rose and stepped on the fire, grinding the coals into the ash, and they went to their beds in the dark.

He lay propped on his side opposite his knitting rib and slept the deep helpless sleep of injury. His dreams, too, were helpless: the dream of the burning stables again, intensified by his exhaustion. A repetitive sound started up nearby. Someone was digging beside him. The stealthy shuffling broke through the loud chaos of his dream. The sound went on insistently and he began to rise up, irritated, through the heavy sleep. The digger cried out, waking him.

Standing in his pallet, he saw through the dark a faint moving outline dragging the girl up from her bed. It took only a moment. A fistful of knotted hair, curls dense as a lamb's, held tight in his hand; and the man flinched in surprise. His own jaw clenched. A clean pass, adrenaline giving it more than he'd meant, became a lop; a sinewy jump of the crown against his palm as the body fell away. He flung the limp leaking weight from the girl and pulled her up; he bent cursing and ran his hands over the sodden wool, looking for the tear, sightless.

Her ragged breath felt hot against his collarbone. "I'm not cut," she said, then curled her fingers into his shirt, sobbing.

The girl's uneven voice came up in gasps from his chest after a while. "You don't understand. There was nowhere I could go, and everyone–everyone wanted something from me, they _took _it and they lied to me. And now that we're here, I thought it would be safer, but that man didn't even know who I _am_, and he _still_ wanted–" She choked on tears and he held her to him, feeling her small ribcage shudder under his arm, her anger and terror. "I thought it was you at first, but it was a stranger… He's too big, I couldn't _do anything–_" The injustice made her voice break.

She had thought it him. Bright in his memory was the underside of her chin, lit pale green and trembling, reflected on the blade. At first, she had thought it him.

"… and I'm so tired of it, everyone grabs at me…"

He couldn't hear the end; it was muffled into his chest. Her knees began to give and he held her shoulders and followed her slowly, her legs doubling beneath her, until they were both sitting on the ground. The wind cooled his chest where her dress had soaked through his tunic. Her fists in her lap were white at the knuckles. He cleared his throat and wiped his wet hands off on the moss behind him. Her breathing was rapid.

The hum of insects started up again and she was silent. He had nothing to say. He wished helplessly for something to give her–something, anything–but what meager gift he had tasted sour. _Anger will kill the fear, _he could tell her, but for the snag: _what, then, kills the anger?_

It was Gerion who had first spoken of it, in his own youth. Before the glittering pit that was Cersei, he'd been the younger Lannister's squire, and every morning the drawling voice with its ripple of humor had answered his. Gerion, with his blunt wit and his dagger-sharpness, his countless and unaccountable acts of geniality.

One afternoon, Gerion had remarked idly on something he'd overheard Lord Tywin say of Gregor. The boy, bristling, lapsed into silence; the knight standing beside him in the sun probed into it with his vivid curiosity.

"Not overmuch fond, are you." The pale-gold face searched his.

"He hates me and I hate him," he'd said, simply.

"I can see," Gerion had said, his eyes sober, "that you're afraid of him, and the fear has turned to hate. Perhaps you haven't yet noticed the problem with hate." Wryness showed in the twist of his narrow lip. "Imagine a banquet where you can have anything you choose; you must only decide your taste, and it will be brought to you. Now imagine a man who chooses to eat only what he's used to–the dish that others have fed him in the past. It's an empty dish, this one he chooses, but he eats from it in spite of all the lovely things he might otherwise have; and no matter how much he eats, he starves. Tell me that isn't you."

"But what he's _done_, and no one stops him," he'd responded, and closed his mouth on the rest.

"And no one will," Gerion had answered, the twist lifting, "but you didn't answer me. Are you that man?" He'd waited, head tilted, and, receiving silence, leaned and kicked gently at the boy's toe. "You're taller; you'll be needing new boots soon." Then he turned, his thin cheek tawny in the sun, and left the question behind him in the air.

The boy had no answer then, nor had the Hound any now. He had, however, his word; he pulled her pallet close to his and waited for her to come. The chattering of her teeth behind him as she changed from her wet dress was like the skittering of leaves.

Lying in the dark, he heard a change in the girl's breathing, her lips moving in whispers, an archaic prayer to the nameless tree-gods of her home. He listened, and watched the sky through the pocket in the canopy. Some time later, she folded in her sleep to settle against him; the small warm pressure, inexplicably heavy, caved him in.


	32. Chapter 32

The morning was as hazy silver and serene as the one before, but it had brought with it a change: as he woke, the girl still leaned against him.

He packed quietly and brushed away the evidence of their fire. Far in the corner of his eye was the peasant in the ferns, half-covered by a bustling black quilt of crows. Behind him was the sleeping girl lying on her side in her mound of blankets. Only a slice of her small face was visible, her mouth and chin, and they were glossy with dew. He could see the peasant's mouth as well; it was open and had a crow in it.

The war had, in the night, crept from its turmoil outside the wood and had come in cold and solleret-shod to find them. The peasant was part of it, wretched and inexorable. Soldiering in the service of the Lannisters had worn into him the lesson that atrocity must be expected and nothing can be saved. In time, he had agreed. Now, looking down at himself in the low mist, he saw the ripple in the weave of his tunic that the girl's fingers had left.

Care holds open a door for terrible pain, terrible fallibility. Understanding this, he had long ago passed over all care for himself to the chilled hands of the Stranger. He had asked nothing in return. Pulling taut the snag in the tunic, he recognized in himself a great dissension and the forgotten ache of care. This would not have so troubled a sound man; as it stood, he was deeply shaken.

He waved away the crows and woke the girl.

She lagged a bit, walking behind him over to the corpse in the bush, and when it was before her she stood with her hands clasped at her chest and looked at it with solemnity. Dried rivulets laced her neckline. Her lashes were clumped and her lids rosy and swollen; she did not blink.

"There. Now you know." _Does she? _It was not she that had asked anything of him. He'd asked only of himself, and there it lay, given freely. His vow and the sum of him; a man's head lying in the dirt, a loud circle of crows.

A small and absent nod, to the peasant rather than to him. She cut a glance at the head and he toed it to face her, and saw her eyes widen, and then in them a flash as he'd seen with Joffrey on the parapet, her jaw setting, the fine bow of her shoulders pulling back. He felt, disconcertingly, both satisfaction and a spear of shame at himself; her eyes met his and the thunderous gravity of her youth and all the weight of his actions were there in them. She turned away, back to the horse.

In the worn pouch at the dead man's hip were two coins, a length of twine, a poor dagger with a patchy hide sheath, a carrot; and, tucked with affection into a twist of woven hemp, a minuscule bit of bone. He shook it out into his palm and looked at it closely in the sun; it took some moments before he realized it was a babe's tooth.

The morning had run late. She ate her bread and an apple on the horse. He stalled at a stream so she could scrub away the blood. Her face shone pink with cold and her hairline was slick as she walked back up to him. Her eyes were watering. A missed smudge of rust capped one wet ear; he took his rag from his belt and wiped at it, his movements as slow and deliberate as one extending a hand to a wild creature chance-met. She allowed him, and kept her eyes at his, and when he was done said, "Thank you," in her soft composed voice.

In the saddle she was tense and silent. A discomfort hung between them. The line of her shoulders tapped occasionally at the spread of his ribs, and in them he felt her restiveness. After a long hour of it, nettled, he finally broke.

"You may as well have it out, whatever it is."

She tilted up and he saw the restiveness sitting plain in her eyes. "No one will know what that man _did_. No one will even see his body."

"That's true enough," he replied, thinking of the crows.

"I shouldn't be so glad that he's dead. I shouldn't be glad that anyone's dead, but sometimes I find that I am." Her voice had deepened with the weight of her emotion. "The gods know what he did, and that should be enough, shouldn't it?"

"_I _know what he did. And you saw what I did in return. What do the gods think of that?" He waved an overhanging strand of vine from his brow.

"I couldn't know," she said, distantly.

"Well spoken. Tell me, what would _you_ have had me do?" The nettle brought more bite to the words than he intended.

Her eyes tilted up again and her lips parted, but she said nothing.

"Again well spoken, little bird. But there are no halfway killers."

They rode in silence for some time, the wood brightening into the full-gold halo of late morning and the high chattering chorus above them solidifying into a single dense song. The horse slowed in the narrow trail. The Hound, lost in the angry tangle of his thoughts, started when the girl sighed and leaned her shoulders back against him.

"I _know_ that, and I know what I'd have you do." Her voice was even and calm, picking up the thread of their talk as though only moments had passed. "It's not that I'd prefer him alive. It's only that I don't want to find myself… rejoicing death. Anyone's death. Don't you see?"

For a bleak instant he did see; not only her character but the void separating them. The peasant's death had been a necessity and did not sting him, nor did the poignant bit of tooth in its hempen knot. He was stung instead in the dark of his core. Once, he had knelt before her and told her of the single death in which he would rejoice, and it was a truth that he could not rescind.

Nor, most bitterly, could he rescind his vow to her; with it he had ensured she watch him at his kills. They rode on. She leaned against him in silence, and the overwhelming quiet of the void lay in it.

Bright hours passed. The sunlight, now at a slant, was hot on his shoulders and because he was sore he was grateful for it, not minding the sweat at his nape. The girl had kept silent except for an occasional request for the water, but now, looking up from the nest of his curled arm, she patted at his hand on the rein. This was her chosen method of halting the horse and the informal grace of it, stacked alongside all of her other little dignities, continued to amuse him.

After setting her down, he walked out some depth into the bramble. The air at the ground was damp and cool and loam-scented. He pulled his wet hair to a knot and stretched, yawning; then, standing there shivering with his fingers laced high above his head and the last of the yawn hollowing out his chest, he felt the singular prickle of observation. He turned around. The bramble before him was a low unbroken grey-green wall, blank and empty. He looked up. The pines, too, were empty. He breathed shallowly for some moments, to only faraway birdcall. The prickle kept at his spine; he turned back through the bramble towards the girl.

A shard of crisp goose feather jutting up incongruously from the bracken at his feet caught his eye. He toed it from its soil bed. It was not a feather but fletching, still bound gummily to the cracked shaft of its arrow. He knelt to it. The shaft had been soaked black from the crack nearly to the fletching; the old blood crackled off in his palm. The missing length of shaft and the bodkin had crawled away with the body. He looked about him again to the dense wall of green. _I'd not_ _have heard it coming either._ A faint rankness wafted up from the broken end. _Where, then, would she go? _He tossed away the arrow and made for the horse.

The girl was trailing around the grazing horse with her skirts in her hands, and turned at his approach. Her gleaming heart-shaped face, tilted to the side, seemed to him to show a flicker of relief, but he could think only of the arrow.


	33. Chapter 33

The flock of crows and the arrow had cast a pall over him that lasted through his evening and now through his quiet hunt. Afterward he set his prize just outside the circle of clearing. He sat by himself in the dark wood, watching the tall shadows of the girl through the low-lit cracks in the palisade, and chewed on the tumult that had spat up from the well of him since he had taken her. She stood by the horse, hugging herself, looking at the sky. At the sight of her, he regretted his parting words and the impulse which had pressed his scar against her cheek. It was unnecessary, clumsy. She knew well what to expect and that was evident in her fierce courtesy, itself a refusal. He scooped up the velvety pile of doves and went to her.

She ducked at the crack of a branch, eyes wide at him, startled by his approach. He was brought back to the first time she'd looked up at him. She was beside her sister, standing gowned for reception before the severe stonework of her home. The blue, arrested, had been swallowed up for a breath, pupils blowing in her shock; then she'd remembered herself, looked away, dipped gravely to the riders behind them each in turn. Later, he had watched her be presented to the crown prince.

She had held herself poised and had lowered her eyes before Joffrey's, but her back had straightened, dropping deep the hollows of her collarbone. She was perfect in her expectation. He could see clearly that moment in memory, the girl's tremendous innocence, the prince's half-smile, all lazy appraisal; the flutter of her lowering eyes.

Her eyes had lowered at himself as well, in avoidance. He had taken advantage of the demurral and spent some time looking at her; at her bearing**,** at the smooth haughty line of her throat. Now he again inspected her, contoured as she was by the small fire, undiminished by the raw wild of her backdrop. Shadow pooled in those hollows at her collarbone.

He rubbed his brow with the back of his hand and began twisting at wings. Clumps of soot-grey feathers blew out from the splitting birds and, whipped up by the low breeze, swirled around them. The girl watched for a moment with distaste and turned her back on him, and he laughed into his work. Her steps crackled out into the wood and he looked up to see her in the leaves, facing away, small and patient and disapproving. "Hide, then, and I'll eat them myself," he called. She turned her head slightly and, seeing the doves tucked in their bark nests, came slowly back to him out of the brush.

They talked of her mother, then of the war raging outside the wood. He found in the girl a reluctance to speak of Stannis, and he recognized in that reluctance a struggling hope for her brother. He listened to her scattered thoughts as they slowly warmed into confidences. She drew closer to him, but her gaze stayed at the fire. The tousled crown of her head caught the light in glowing filaments; her unwashed hair had reclaimed its wave there in a roughed halo. The warm musky smell of it carried to him. Her voice softened. "I did think about what it would be like, myself as Queen. I thought about what I'd do... how my days would be, what I'd do and say." She snaked a look at him under her lashes. "I had supposed you'd laugh."

He shook his head slightly. The girl frowned at a fray in her wrist. "I made up a song for myself and Joffrey. Really I made it up only partway; it went much like the song of Queen Naerys and the Dragonknight, in truth." This last came tempered with a rueful smile. He looked at the girl sharply, but the smile was only at herself and for the child she'd been. And still was; he knew the song well himself. Cersei had called often for it after dinners, and her lovely wine-blushed lips would whisper along through certain lines. Her twin had only laughed and Robert had only drunk, and she had clapped with wry glee at the end every time. "I never told Joff, of course. But I made up others, too." Again a darting glance. Her voice lowered, confessional. "About my reign. I thought out how I'd behave, how they'd all love me, receive me gladly."

He inclined his head and tapped at a bark pocket with a twig. A small thread of steam escaped. There was a tinge of desolation in her voice; he steered her from it. "Tell me what you heard in Maegor's."

"Only that they were ramming King's Gate, and the Mud Gate had fallen. When I left the ballroom, Joffrey was at the castle gatehouse, but the Queen had sent for him. She walked out and left all the women just standing there, and Moon Boy was singing." Her eyes were straight at him, glowing their peculiar early-morning blue. "I wonder what songs they've since made of Cersei. Don't you wonder, too? I might hear them when I get to Winterfell. Do you think _time_," she was tugging a thread from the sleeve and her top lip dragged up a bit from her teeth with the word, "could make those songs sweeter?" The lip, a little curled, tipped the grin to wolfish. He grinned back at her, and thought of Queen Naerys.

The skirmish which left his lowly ancestor hobbling and cursing his slow way over the grounds also left him a towerhouse, the boon which raised the Cleganes to prosperity. This sudden respectability did nothing to diminish the acerbic wit common to the line; the Hound had his share and made little effort to tamp it. What he did hide was that source from which it sprung, a streak of inventiveness which slipped out occasionally in his speech. Now, sitting across from her in the glowing near-dark, the streak asserted itself.

"Some men have this said of them, that they were born to wear a crown. I know I heard that of Lord Tywin often enough. But Cersei was born _with_ a crown. Not so anyone could see, mind, but I'd wager if you shook her hard enough you'd hear it rattle."

The girl had stopped pulling at the fray and was staring at him, the slant of her lip puckering the way it did when she found something to be amusing which her politeness disallowed. He felt his own grin pulling tight the numbed side of his mouth.

"Did you ever try?" And she was laughing at him, her soft inoffensive laugh. "I don't suppose you did. You do have your head." She fanned out her skirt. "How beastly it was that I still would have been wed to Joff. I was very nearly a Lannister. It made me sick to think on, but the queen assured it, even at the end."

"Nearly so. She would've, or else Lord Tywin. Gratification's like a flame in the Lannisters. In most of them it's a candle, and you see it flicker when they've almost got their hand on what they want." A shadow ran across his mind: the little lord's sharp mismatched gaze needling up at him. He brushed it away. "In Cersei it was never only a candle, or even a torch." He looked away from the girl's face, remembering. "It was her whole self afire." The girl looked up at him, tapping her finger on the toe of her slipper.

"Can you guess the last words I heard her say?" He shook his head. She drew her shoulders back and tilted down her chin, dropped her voice into the low tone of the Queen's, and now it was the shadow of Cersei that appeared before his eyes. "'Get out of my way'."

The Hound laughed, leaning back on his palms. She took this tribute with a half-smile, but her brow had darkened. "She'd told me, just before, that she'd not suffer Stannis' judgment. Nor, I suppose, mine. So she had Ser Ilyn waiting in the corner for us both... But when the news came, she never even looked at me, she just walked out." Her fingers dropped back to the fray. "At first, I thought she'd decided to spare me, then I realized she'd just forgotten me." A sliver of batting fell to the loam. "When I first saw her, she looked so lovely, like what I'd always thought a queen to be."

He rubbed the smoke from his eye with the heel of his hand. "Might be you didn't look hard enough. And maybe you'd not heard, up there in the North, that the throne is only for the ruthless. As is power."

She frowned. He turned to the fire and the doves in their pockets of bark. He licked a thumb and pulled them out, waved the steam away and broke apart the fragile husks. She extended a doubtful hand for hers.

"Don't make that face. Here, hold it like this. Try it." She did, and he laughed, watching her as she tasted it and forgot herself. They ate in happy single-mindedness, the wood creaking and chattering away around them.

In the quiet at the end of their meal, he could feel the girl's eye lingering on him. His scars faced her. He waited through the long moment, but her gaze hung, and he was discomfited.

In a certain way, the years of averted eyes had formed him. That spark of primal disfavor the scar brought out in his fellow man had both salted his wound and bound it, for he had also found its use. Men feared him. Considered flawed by first glance, he had stopped trying to prove himself as otherwise**, **and his armour had held up well through the years. What unsettled him now was the girl's artless stare, clattering as it did at his breastplate and resounding through the hollow beneath.

He had demanded often that she look at him, he recalled; demanded her attention, all of it; extracted an unnameable thrill from it. This was different. Unasked, she was casually looking at him, same as she might anyone. It was at once disconcerting and gratifying.

"Get used to anything if you look enough. Don't mind it much, then?"

She shook her head as she finished chewing and said with nonchalance, "I did mind, before, but it went away." She wiped daintily at her chin and looked steadily at him. He held her eye as long as he was able; then, wholly agitated, he rose and left the small source of his vexation sitting there quietly by the fire.


	34. Chapter 34

**Chapter 34**

He woke to her touch. She had pushed her way through the layers of blankets to curl around him and settled herself, warm and torpid, sharp knees pressing the backs of his thighs. He thought for a moment that he dreamt it, that his sleeping mind had winnowed out of itself a poultice for its solitude, and he was lying with his eyes open in the dark thinking this when he became aware of her humid breath seeping through the weave of his tunic. It was real. Her hands moved, grabbing it up in fistfuls, and her forehead was pressed between his shoulderblades. She twitched against him; she was dreaming. As she clung there he felt her breathing grow calm. Her fists relaxed, but his tunic was still balled in her hands and her forehead still rested against him. He allowed himself to feel her grip and to drop for a moment into its boundless intimacy, and then he laughed at himself and drew himself out again. She was not holding him but his heart; she had pressed herself between his shoulders for the comfort of its beat sounding in her dreams.

He pulled the blankets tighter around them. The wind sounding high in the trees was as soothing as it had been in his early childhood. For a time he listened to his own heart, as she was, then slept deep. His dreams were pleasant, scattered, weightless; his dog barking behind the gate, the armourer laying a knotted string across his shoulders, the bright rutted path in the field that led down to the mill, with tall dry stalks waving on either side.

Footsteps jerked him awake. A heavy fog sat over the clearing, and when he opened his eyes he had for a startled moment the sensation of being underwater; he was standing with sword in hand before he saw clearly. It was a boy, spindly, about the girl's age, raking through the ash. The boy had a cast in one eye and stood shaking before him, the eye flickering. The Hound sighed and waved him away and the boy crashed back to the wood, bounding like a hare. He looked down. The girl was sitting up in her pile of bedding, her hand at his ankle.

"What was he doing in the fire?" She was looking at the empty break the boy had run through. There was bewilderment and compassion in her voice.

"I doubt he knows. Looking for anything he could find. Probably thought there'd be scraps left. More than not, he'd been watching us through the night."

"Where are the rest of his people?" Her voice tapered away as she asked, and her face became solemn. He lay back. The girl looked down at him for a moment, then back to the ashes of the fire. In the blue fog she looked small and ghostly sitting there, shoulders hunched, her hair damp and sleek against her head. He watched her through half-closed eyes and thought about the boy, who, if he managed to live, would become part of that silent clan of men that roam the wood and bear allegiance to no other. The late king's rebellion had birthed hundreds; this new war had birthed hundreds more. On the outskirts of every village, the poorest families had their menfolk swept away to war and their women dissolved by sickness and strain. Overburdened neighbors closed their doors against the boys left behind, but the wood offered out its dark hand. Soon in the dense edges of the Kingsroad were boys too young for men's war, yet made old by the wood, by hunger; wilder and more treacherous than any beast.

The girl shifted and turned to lie down beside him. She rubbed her wet hair in her blanket and, thinking him asleep, leaned to press her damp cold face into his arm, for its heat. He was reminded for a moment of those girl children whose lives had been blown over by the Rebellion. While their brothers had crept away to the dark, these had been held tight by the villages; far too precious, there was no quiet wood for them. Only kitchens and sculleries and fields, and later in life the beds of their grasping benefactors, or of the sad and ruthless rustic brothels. War ate them as relentlessly as it did the young men left in stripped heaps in the battlefield, just slower. He had not thought much about it before. The girl shuddered against him and yawned. He felt her teeth brush his arm.

They slept late and woke, and ate and rode. It was late morning when the fog warmed and fell and broke into rain.

They took refuge in the lee of an overhang, and he taught the girl how to make a net. Her thin fingers wove the cord deftly through the knots. He listened to the rain beat down the ridge and the thin outraged cries of birds, the crash of falling branches, and the girl's soft breathing. He put his arm over his eyes and dozed. When the rain stopped, he sat up and found the girl sitting crosslegged at the edge of the outcropping, braiding her hair. She half-turned at the sound.

"I saw a fox run by, just now."

He nodded, handed her bag to her, and they crawled from their shelter.

The horse, wet and testy, knocked at him with his muzzle as he packed. He stopped and rubbed the cold silky face. The ears flattened, and he sighed, turning to the girl.

"Are you much wet?"

"No, my hair's dried. But my dress is, a little." She held her hands out to accept her cloak and stood beside him, frowning, small and composed, wrapped in the brown cloak. Her bang, tousled by drying, swept back towards her braid like a bright wispy coxcomb. He frowned back at her, mocking, pleased.

The leaves before them rustled; he reached down to grasp her wrist and said, "Hold still, now." She did, but her eyes went to his and then followed his gaze to her feet where a shining cord, patterned in black diamond spots, wound past. She jerked and he felt her pulse start up fast in his palm. "Don't mind it. It'll pass by."

She recoiled, squeezing shut her eyes, and he grinned at her and stepped forward to lay his toe gently behind the sleek diamond-shaped head. Her hand jumped in his; he let go and stooped to pick up the stilled cord. Its gleaming mouth was open, bright as a leaf, gaping impotently. He held the whipping body from him and turned to the girl.

"No, no." She shuddered back from his outstretched hand.

"He's caught, he can't hurt you. Have you ever looked at one this close?" The fangs, thin as hairs, were glazed with fluid. "See those drops? Look; this pattern means he's poisonous. Most aren't."

"Oh." He watched her face. She studied the snake with a mix of revulsion and curiosity. The curiosity won out; she leaned in to stare. "It's just like the book. Don't let it bite you. Oh, it smells awful, do you smell that?"

Her eyes were wide. He, still grinning, bent and loosed the viper towards the brush.

"I'd thought you were going to kill it..." Her voice, aimed to where the snake had disappeared, was uneven.

"No, they're shy, they don't often harm. Unless you step on them." He stopped, rubbing his hands across a dry clump of fern to rid them of the smell. "What book?"

"An old one in the library, at home. It tells all about the crannogmen, and has some paintings. It scared me when I was little." She went on in her soft voice while he packed, about the little wild crannogmen and their poisoned arrows, about Howland Reed and her father's fierce mutual loyalty. He noticed she kept half an eye at the brush. When she finished, he cut an apple and handed her half, and lifted her to the horse. She ate with relish. He settled behind her.

"They do the same in Dorne."

She tilted back to look up at him, chewing, grinning. "Eat frogs?"

He laughed. "Maybe so. But Dornishmen, too, catch snakes, and Dorne snakes are far deadlier. They milk the venom into little bottles to poison their spears. Seems the spears themselves aren't enough. A long and wretched way to die." He leaned to take the uneaten bit of core from her hand.

"I wonder why the gods made such creatures as snakes." Her voice had gentle disdain. "They're awful and they've no purpose, really."

He snorted, chewing. "Oh, they've a purpose. Everything here does; doesn't mean it's always a good one."

Drops rained from leaves and the wet bristles of the pines swept across them as they passed. It was quiet but for these. Ferns sprang back from the horse's legs and spattered droplets up at them, and the heavy after-storm smell poured up from the wet bracken. The girl leaned back against him, and the wide green tangle opened up below them down the ridge. In the low hazy distance, he could see the dozens of cut trails dark as tunnels, reaching out from the wood towards the Road.


	35. Chapter 35

After they returned to the clearing, he sent her after kindling and traced her path from his seat in the dirt by the loud bursts of birds scattering from the trees. She was a long time gathering, and in her absence the Hound changed his rank damp clothes and, standing clammy in the watery sun, rubbed at the sore green-black mound of bruising on his side. The welt was warm to the touch and ached doubly now that the rib was knitting. He dressed slowly, leaning against the horse's twitching shoulder, idly watching the birds circle and relight**. **The crashing of her return sounded far before he could see her at the edge of the bank, with sun on her hair, walking slowly towards him, doubtful of her pick.

"Some of it is a bit wet."

"Drop it there, that will do." The moss on the kindling glittered with a fine wet web. She set it down and brushed the bark from her sleeves, and for a while they revolved in the quiet routines of their camp, unspeaking, each lost in disparate thought. The man kicked a fallen log around to face the spit and stood, scratching. Beard was growing in again on his good side, and it itched. It occurred to him how he must look to the little bird, one cheek bare and the other a black wing. He turned, conscious of her eye, to find her squinting up at him. She had been looking for some time, her hands clasped loosely before her in the girlish way she had.

"What will you do, when I am home?"

_Stay. Serve your House, maybe. _He kept silent and the girl continued, "You can't return South now, even if Stannis has won." Her gaze was naked in its speculation.

"Such a pity."

_It was true. Gregor had what had been his home once, and he'd well-earned those lands. He had seen with his own eyes the price sewn up in its winding-sheet with a candle to the Stranger and another to the Father at its head._

She shook her head, one brisk dismissive shake at the jibe, and reached to put her light fingertips on his forearm. "No matter, Brandon will take you on; and Robb, he will too. They'd have to, in payment." In her voice was all the calm indulgence of regality. The fingertips gave a slight pat.

He looked down into the dusty earnest face and laughed until he coughed. She turned away and brought her flustered hands to her braid and knelt, red, to sort through her bag. He watched her in her discomposure. His future was just as he'd always known, a stilled battlefield, leagues and leagues away from the wood**. **He remembered her brother's face and, particularly, the proud, wary eyes beneath the auburn hair. Lying crumpled on the field, the Young Wolf would once again look far more a boy than a king. _Payment._

He stood over her, needled by something he chose not to examine, rubbing at the welt through his tunic.

"Grand gesture, little bird. Does it so bother you, what to do with me after I've carried you North?"

The red hadn't left her. "It's not… it's only that you've not ever said what you expect."

"And if I did, it wouldn't matter much, would it? Have you any idea how much farther we have to go, or what lies between? Holding close those formalities anyhow, aren't you? Have they served well? Now ask yourself what _has_." He clenched his jaw. "Maybe your brother will bestow a title on me and I could be like one of those knights in your stories. In payment. In the meantime, that kindling's wet and we've nothing yet to eat, and you can be assured that the lions have a few men after us. How much will he owe at the end, do you suppose?"

She leaned from him, cold. "You speak as though it was I that brought _you_ here."

It stung and he had nothing for it. He looked down, away from her eyes. She had brought back from the wood, along with the kindling, a wild fringe of thorn and leaves at the hem of her skirts.

He shook his head and stepped back from her, handing her the bag with her things to put in the sun. She took it, turned and laid out each of her three rumpled dresses with exaggerated care, then she stood over them and stared at him.

"This one," she pointed with the toe of a slipper, "the lace is very fine, from Myr. I don't know if you noticed when _you_ packed for me." Emotion leached the civility from her voice. He looked at the dress and then at his hands, and asked her if she remembered where they'd left her net.

The girl shifted. Her eyes were steady at him, the strange blue bright against her flushed face.

"Yes, why? What happened?"

"Go and look after it. If it's full, bring it. If it's empty, be quiet and let it be."

Her skirts swept behind her in a wide ragged line back to the break in the wood they had made earlier. He sat for a while on the log with his elbows on his knees, scowling, then he rose to follow her.

The girl was absorbed in the sight of the writhing rabbit in the net and his approach was so quiet he went unnoticed behind her. Her rapid breathing was harsh even over the convulsive twisting of the net in the leaves. He could see the glossy corner of her wide eye as she bent to the net, and the rabbit shot back to its warren in a scatter of twigs. She stood up, the net swinging limp from her hand. The canopy was silent. The net had stilled the raucous parade in the brush. She felt his gaze and turned, slowly. Her pupils widened and she paled with embarrassment.

"Glad I taught you, for the good it did." He pointed at the dangling net.

Angry tears ran down her puckered face. She was hissing at him through her small teeth.

"I'm a _lady_." She drew the word out with deliberation. Broken twigs and autumn leaves still wreathed her hair. He felt himself smiling. His own irritation faded in a curious ebb.

Gerion was well-read and occasionally lectured him on tactical matters; mostly because the knight was expansive as a rule and liked, along with a great variety of other things, the sound of his own voice. He remembered well that voice. There had been a morning when, frustrated to trembling, training against an older and contemptuous squire, he'd jerked away angrily from a lazy thrust. He was unaccustomed to the new weight of a cuirass, and the dodge somehow accelerated until the ground came up to hit him in the back. He clattered inside the cuirass and lost his breath. From across the yard came a slow clapping; it was Gerion, who wandered over and extended down his hard hand, at the same time reciting his favored _Tactics _by Maester Aryon. 'Let the opponent become so inflamed that he passes that crucial moment when nerve and calculation are equal. Too early and calculation will allow him the greater defense; at the point of equality his opposition will be most effective. Only wait past that point and he will blunder in his red fog, and he is yours.' The boy took both the hand and the droll words at face value, and the next morning the older squire left the yard green and shaky-kneed, dented at the gut. Years later, he'd watched as Gerion's nephew used the same method to great effect, with Cersei.

The Hound grinned at the memory and looked at the girl. Her throat was as red as her hair. The imperiousness had dissolved and she was flushed, nettled; inexpressibly earthly, wretchedly dear.

He leaned forward and pushed. "A lady, then. Little lady, alone in the wood, watching your supper run away. Starks must think they can eat dignity. Let me warn you, your father lost his taste for it when he lost–"

The last bit of composure dropped from her with a clatter. She ran to him, howling, and was at him in a bound, clawing at his face. He put his hands on the small hard shoulders and held her at arm's length before gathering her up in an embrace.

"I hate you," she hissed, flattening her palms against his chest to push him away. He laughed harshly, but was far less pleased than he'd thought to be; he slid his arms from hers and regarded her. In a way, he did have his victory: that studied courtliness of hers was her armament against lions; worn before him, it meant only that she counted him amongst them. Now that complaisance was shattered, she was trembling with wrath. The conquest was his, but he found it meager. He turned away, and leaned to swing the quiver across his shoulder. Once beyond the thin copse, he stood and wiped at his face. His knuckles came away red from his tingling cheek and he rubbed them on his thigh, grinning sourly.

In the silence after they ate, he sat scratching away the thin coat of rust from the mail at his knees and watched her stare at him from the corner of his eye. Her face was composed again, the hatred gone, redness now only at her swollen lids and the peak of her lips. She sat calm, shoulders back, looking him over. He shifted.

"What?" In response she only tilted her chin, her eyes still on his. "It's rude to stare."

She looked pointedly to the remains of the spit smoldering in the ash. "Why did you want me to do that?"

_Why, indeed? _She was hardly older than he had been when he'd learned the final, simple stipulation of the wild. The night his father's body had been brought home, the men stayed late in the hall, talking quietly. His brother's deep voice rose hoarsely against the others, unmistakable. Two distinct words carried up the stairwell: _my rights._ The boy needed no further warning. Hurriedly he packed and dropped from a window-ledge, seen by no one. The night was cool, dark, barely moonlit; he ran hidden in the shadow of the Keep. Before him was a narrow lane that wound its way to Casterly Rock and to its sides was the black tangled weald. The lane would be far faster, the weald was dense. He chose. Because he knew his way, the briars hardly touched him.

At dawn he'd heard hounds in the distance, his keep's hounds, goaded by his keep's men. _They know_,_ and yet when they catch me they'll carry me back. _He'd understood, even as he ran, that they had no choice, same as the maester who'd dabbed him with ointment, but averted his eyes from the fresh red scratches on Gregor's hand. Silence, too, from the men who'd pulled the boys from the brazier, and one had been his father. Now Gregor had again their father's silence, and to keep it he'd need his younger brother's as well. The hounds' faraway call moved up through the trees. He pushed away all thought and aimed for the creek, running so hard a white hurt clawed his lungs, and once in the water he shook the dogs, but not, he knew, his brother.

A fortnight later, he was somehow still free, but hungrier than he could bear. He stunk of fear, and everything that could fled from him. What little he'd managed to catch he couldn't cook because the smoke might draw the riders. No breaking branch had to tell him that he was still hunted–his brother's command would be to bring him back, not to _try_–but the branches broke day and night, terrifyingly. So he ate hare raw in thin wet shreds, salivating and gagging equally; ate roots, nettles, bulbs of grass that numbed his mouth. It was a long, arduous way north, on foot. Near the end of it, he found himself pulling away loose bark and swallowing what was behind without looking, without chewing.

One morning, there were columns of smoke in the sky ahead. The next night he sat dazed at a long bench, wolfing brown bread and stew, and a raven had flown from Casterly Rock to Clegane Keep with his young master's gracious acceptance of its bestowal.

Was it then, swallowing grubs, that he had learned that survival meant bending himself to the will of the wild blackness around him? He'd acquiesced, surrendered his pride, ate what was given him, and so had lived. Had he not then carried this lesson to Casterly Rock, to King's Landing?

"You'll learn what hunger will have you do," he said, simply.

The girl slowly shook her head at him. Her expression was remote, but her eyes were curious. "What is it that you want me to be?"

"I want you to see the world as it is. Start by seeing the wood as it is; start with the fucking net."

They sat in tense silence. She broke it with the question he had been waiting for, and her tone made it a challenge, barely veiled.

"Why did you take me?"

He was silent. To answer would be to admit something he preferred to keep folded away inside himself, but she leaned forward, repeating the question, pushing, her red-rimmed eyes bright in the low firelight. The truth came out helplessly.

"I took something I shouldn't have."

He sat by himself by the fire for a long time after she'd gone to her blankets. He rose when it burned to coals, and shuffled the pallets around to lie down beside her as quietly as he could.


	36. Chapter 36

**Chapter 36**

The thread between them repaired itself by necessity over three quiet, clear days of riding. She hummed sleepily in the early mornings, breaking into fragments of song while she picked leaves from her braid. The bright childishness of her voice was dissolving to a lower timbre and her singing trailed to him as he revolved through his morning work, candid, unmodulated, entirely private. In its way, this was an acceptance. In another way, it was an assertion. He looked over occasionally through the fog to catch her face unguarded, consumed with song. Her armour was left aside and he believed that he had succeeded. They talked to each other through the evenings while he baked fish and afterward through the fires, and into the night.

A windstorm came on the night of the third day, a breath of autumn not cold but strong, and he watched the little bird see for the first time in her life a northern storm hit a southern forest. It shocked her, he realized; not the ferocity, as her childhood must have been one constant scouring wind, but the impact. He'd seen for himself the spare and elegant North wood bend without complaint to the high ice winds, the needles letting a storm weave through them as they had for a hundred thousand cold years. But here in the South the wood was lush and the canopy a lace of broad flat green jostling for sun. Now the canopy screamed as the wind lifted it; yellowing leaves and branches pattered down to the litter in waves. Down at the scrubby floor nothing touched them but acorns and a few whistling gusts, and they watched the struggling sky. The curling leaves above them rattled as pennants_, _all their branches thrown up like skirts, and grew louder as dusk came.

The fire whipped away in scattering coals once, twice, and finally he let it go and sat with her in the dark. Clouds raced over the moon, showing flashes of her face in pale blue.

She looked up at him. "Under us, do you feel that? The ground is moving."

"It's not the ground that's moving, little bird." But it did feel so, heaving under his calves. He swept the crusted plate of leaves between them to the side and took her wrist to put her palm to the ground, pressing his flat over it, hard to the soil. Above them, the branches creaked like a waterwheel over the fast-river rushing of the wind; the trunk they leaned against strained in the gust, trembling on its way back.

"It's the roots," she said, looking down at his hand and then, squinting, up to the leaves. "How far can it be pushed before it falls?" Her hand pulled gently out from under his.

He stared at her, then looked ahead and guessed. This Northern storm, diluted by distance, was nothing compared to Winterfell's, but she would have watched those from her bed inside its walls. Now she lay in a strange wood, her family torn, disbanded, the walls uncountable nights away, and at her side a companion she had not asked for. She had put careful nonchalance over the question, but her hand crumpling the hem of her dress to her fist betrayed her. The nonchalance was pride; the tense fists were the truth.

"Farther than you'd ever think. Like most things," he said, with a sudden harsh laugh, and watched her struggle from the corner of his eye.

"Our trees in the North just let the storms through. They're so different." She tilted her head away from him; he could see her eyes shining glassy. "It's so beautiful here, like a dream. I'd never imagined anything like it, so much green, and the _flowers_... you simply forget that there could be anything else. But storms do come. And what doesn't bend breaks, isn't that so?"

He winced in the dark, but there was nothing to say to this, so he handed over her blankets. She coiled up her braid and set to her small scrubby bed and the quiet shuffling gave him a twinge. '_How do you like your new cage, bird? Good deal bigger.' _It had been a halfway jest, but the enormity of it hit him now. _I will be left carrying an empty cage, if the bird dies away. _He turned to her, frowning.

"It's all right. It's just the storm." Behind the wry denial was a formidable courage, and he grimaced at it and shook his head. A pale glint of teeth showed as her smile fell. "Only… how can we know this one won't fall while we're sleeping?" Her voice had lost its despair and was hers again. He breathed, relieved, and leaned toward her blue-lit face.

"See those?" He pointed up where the leaves whipped against the flashing sky. "Those tall ones catch the most of it. They'd fall first, if any; this one's young, not as strong, it can bend further." She nodded crisply to herself and lay back, and he realized how well-proven she must have found his words.

He settled then and closed his eyes. The first scraps of dreams were intruding in his thoughts when her voice came again, clear and low behind his shoulder.

"I bent to the Lannisters."

The admission was easier for her, perhaps, because it was to him she made it. He'd bent so far in his short rough life as to become the dregs of himself. Eyes still shut, he pushed back an elbow to rest against hers for a moment, then drew it back.

"I had to." Her explanation was bare, neither plaintive nor regretful. He grunted in response, an acknowledgment and concurrence both. The dreams seeped in again; he slept.

In the roaring dark, he woke to an odd presentiment, a constriction in his chest. Then, to his rear left, not far, he heard a high tearing whine, a great sigh, a low thrum shaking the air like a harp; the rushing sounds of branches, and a hollow concussion so loud he jerked upright in the blankets.

The shudder of the impact poured through the ground and through them before it was absorbed. She put her hand at his elbow. Behind them, the horse paced and blew. It was some time before he slept again.

The next morning he woke late to the sound of his stomach and, packing, looked at his horse, lean under his black coat, shuffling and blowing bursts of steam. Coming back from the brush, he stretched and scratched at his nape and thought it over. The Road was certain recognition; an inn certain entrapment. He couldn't be certain of who'd won the Blackwater, but he remembered vividly how it had stood when he'd left. The girl blinked up at him from her pallet. Standing, his stomach was much louder, and she laughed at it drowsily.

"Cakes with butter and a new egg," she said softly into the folds of her blanket. He nodded and looked out before him.

The storm had swept away all the litter from the bramble and left behind its gift, a perfect biting freshness. He breathed in deeply; it was sharp and stung pleasantly. Behind him came small sounds. He looked back at her, sitting small and regal on her folded blanket, bright in the morning sun, watching him.

"All right," he agreed, "we'll go."

It was less than a day's ride before the chimneys of the inn, ancient and sooty and sprawling, rose smoking before them.


	37. Chapter 37

**Chapter 37**

It was the last room, furthest from the great hearth, and the worst. _Had they a room in the stable, she'd not have offered this. _He grinned down after the little crone shuffling from the room, keys banging. She slowed partway down the passage to glance back at him. Outlined and shrunken even further by the glow of the hall, she looked like a bell in her wide skirts; her disfavor of him radiated out, clear as its peal. His grin spread and he turned his back to her to survey the room. It was infused with a cheese-rind must and the floorboards soft with creeping damp, but the girl beside him had no eyes for it. She saw only the tub in the corner, and turned to him. He assented.

"There is that, at least."

"Oh, I didn't expect this. Thank you." Looking at her bath, she put her hand on his forearm and patted absently at him, a pleased gesture that charmed him with its frankness. As he locked the door behind him, he saw her lit by the low hearth. She seemed very small, standing there in the low bare room, undoing her braid and humming, oblivious to him.

Pausing in the end of the dark tilted hallway, he examined his choice again and still saw it foolhardy. Sudden anxiety washed over him in the cramped hall, that tingling, too-familiar apprehension that had been his since he was a child. His stakes were higher now, were they not? In the Lannisters' service he had discovered a basic and valuable truth: a man who fears for his fortune is no match for the man who fears no loss, not even of his own life. He had ridden selfless and laughing to each combat in the string of endless battles, and had always ridden away alive**.** Now he'd found himself a thorny fortune, prickling but vital. He was needful of it and thus hung in the dark, worrying, even as he knew the damage was done.

Ringing, dissonant song sounded from the hall, wooden cups hitting benches, serving girls cawing. The doorway to the hall glowed flickering gold. He looked at the key in his palm. He could take a second room, sleep, but the anxiety made his fingers numb, and he went instead to the hall. In the archway leading to the kitchen was the little crone with her hand at the serving girl's elbow, speaking intently; the girl's eyes flickered to him, pretty eyes sharply contrasted by the split at her lip. Just beyond was a flurry of laughing young women loading platters, flour on their cheeks and hair, but they did not bother to look at him at all.

The heads at the benches bobbed up at his re-entry to the hall but for one, a thin man in a goatskin tunic, but, seeing that the girl had been stowed away, they turned back to their shouting**, **disinterested. He didn't mind; he raised his hand and quickly a cup came from over his shoulder and was set before him. The serving girl brought with it the scent of her wrist, stale beer and under that, ginger from the kitchen rubbed on in hope of diversion.

"Our best, ser." Her voice was soft, but the accompanying eye was shrewd.

The benches were still loaded, but the plates had been cleared away for the most part and the men were now drinking. The hearth, shuddering with flame, added a hazy glow to their animation. It was loud. Seated down from him was a young black-haired man speaking in an inimical tone at the man across from him, a pale beaky creature bearing the unmistakable stamp of deep wood.

"You've ruint it, now. Gone and ruint it." Even in the black-haired man's whisper was the clipped cadence of the northern woods, and the touch of windiness only a much-broken nose can give.

"Haven't." Above the beak and below the thatch of fur-brown hair, brash little cuneate eyes glowed with a particular insubordination. The Hound, veteran of command, recognized it for what it was; idly amused, he drank slowly and listened. The hushed argument increased in volume.

"Had to be broke up some, else too easy seen fer what it is. _You _wouldn' know how things as this is done." Beaky had drawn his hands slowly under the table and the muscles in his arm twitched as he made this pronouncement. "Wantin' to wash your hands of me now; I knew it." A thin shoulder lengthened under the wool as the fingers trailed their way to his boot.

The black-haired man regarded his companion with dispassion. "Hold, there. I'm still along, it's just I say it's ruint now. Think you're clever, but any child could see what it is by just a look. That's why you ruint it by taking it to pieces." He leaned forward and the whisper went sour. "And I know _why _you did it, anyhow. I wish you'd asked before you went an' chipped away at it." He coughed importantly into his fist. "I know what real gold looks like, and them little lions _aren't_."

Beaky was unmoved. "Put it back together yourself then, Urs. I know what a real lion looks like and I don't want any asking after me." Nonetheless, he relaxed and the hands withdrew from underneath the table; they were empty. His tone turned rueful. "They looked gold, from the front side."

His companion laughed, smug. "Didn't think about the back side, did you? You'd have fit in nice fighting for Stannis, he didn't either."

The Hound winced into his cup. Clumped at the bottom was a fine silt and each drink dragged some up in a grainy tang. _A room beside the sty, the ends of the wine barrel, and my questions answered for me_**. **The tang was odd, a resinous burst of the woods at the back of his throat.

Beaky dismissed the jibe, examining a crusted split at his knuckle. "I'd have fit right where I am and that's more than I can say for _you_. I don't have to fight for no one."

"I like the big city well enough,**"** his companion said, leaning back, his angular face suddenly bleak. **"**And there's no point going back North again, _now._"

"Show that plate to the wrong man and there'll be no point goin' anywhere," Beaky said, darkly, to his knuckle.

"It'll be all right," Urs said, looking at the hearth. "You only think of the bad. Well, everything's bad unless you keep moving. I've kept a step ahead so far."

The Hound stirred, slightly. _No point going back North again, now. _A possibility began to show, howling raw through the words.

Beaky's craggy smile was a travesty. He turned his empty cup over and the black-haired man looked away from it. "Keep stepping, then, but don't get on too far ahead of me." There was casual warning in the tone and Urs regarded the smaller man thoughtfully.

Beaky, leaning away from his companion, noticed the Hound. The beady gaze darted over him fast as a blink, but thorough, and rested on the pommel at his side. In the stringy throat the knot bobbed; he was swallowing, covetous, preparing his approach.

"Right-made, that." Bright in the almond eyes was, besides the insolence, a dextrous and wholly impersonal cunning. Closer look revealed a curious wide scar tracing his hairline like a scalping. "I don't know much, but I'd say that's rather fine."

The Hound leaned back and closed his palm over the pommel. "Fine enough, for what must needs be done."

"Castle-forged. Come from King's Landing, then?"

The Hound kept silent and stared steadily into his eyes. For all the cunning, there was no recognition. The stare lingered far past what was polite. "Small for a smith, aren't you? And I'd say _you_ come from the away-back end of whatever crossroads this is."

Beaky, deflected, laughed. "Ah, you have me." The laughter was genuine yet horrible to hear, a sound like a fire-grate being pushed in**. **"Not a smith, no. I worked the fields." Which fields was unspoken, but obvious: the first time the Hound had seen it done, it was a warm silent midday, and a man standing in the field was knocking a gilt helm against his boot, spattering out the brains to the grass. The man straightened and held the wet helm at eye-level to judge the crack. Behind him milled the poorest of the camp-followers**,** combing through the broken grounds to glean what battered profusion the graverobbers left behind. Watching him, the boy had felt only cold**;** he swept his eyes back to the loud group of crimson-clad soldiers he followed. He shook the memory away to grin at Beaky, a half- snarl.

Beaky noted it, but returned it with nonchalance and rose easily. "Best be off." To Urs he gave a lazy nod. "I'll just hold it 'til you come across. Maybe you can put it back together some, then." The door creaked as the little woodsman slipped out. Urs turned away from it, jaw clenched, but soon his eyes crept beside him to where the Hound sat waiting.

"May've heard what me an' that other was speaking of."

Silence.

The man's eye lingered at the Hound's fine hauberk, assessing. "It's not what it sounds. I was owed it for something I'd done, that's how I come across it. I'd like to be rid of it, to be honest."

"I heard you. You won't rid yourself of it with me."

Urs lifted his fingers, a brief conciliatory wave, and he went back to his drink. In profile his heritage was clear. His jaw pulled taut the flesh over sharp cheekbones and around the dark eyes as he bent to drink. The Hound leaned in.

"I heard you say something else, too, and now I'll hear the rest. What's so wrong in the North that there's no point going back?"

Urs' face closed. Wary intelligence paled to wary alarm. "If you do come from King's Landing**,** how's it you don't know?" The eyes narrowed in their heavy black fringe, speculative. "Seat of the North's held. Not only held but the head of the crippled prince tarred and put to a spike; his brother's too, and both just boys. Greyjoy of Pyke is who's done it, him that was raised beside the King in the North all those years."

The Hound's right hand, flat on the table, curled involuntarily beside his cup and Urs, misreading it, shied from the fist and pulled back. A fogged print, shadow of his damp palm, remained on the glassy wood. A cold thread wound high in his chest, but his face stayed blank. _I'll have to take her to her mother, then. To the thick of the war. How to tell her, if it's true? _A despair caught at him and he sat unspeaking. Urs, discomfited, pushed back his platter and made to rise. Nerves took away his footing; he stumbled back to a glancing fall against the shoulder of the man at the opposite bench and righted himself, struggling.

The seated victim half-turned to his assailant and, cackling, wrapped an arm around the slim waist as he'd done with the serving girl, just before. This met with raucous laughter, the faces at the table bobbing like a line of crows but for the man in the goatskin shirt. Demoralized, Urs shook himself free and strode to the door with lowered head, but he'd lost the Hound's attention. The man in the goatskin shirt had, with his wooden disinterest, caught and kept it.

He was a slight man with fine features and the restrained magnetism of an opportunist. His eyes had the unfocused gloss of a dullard's, but there was a tension in the sharp jaw now pointed just away: artifice, expertly handled. Nothing in his bearing belied it but the jaw. The Hound reflected. That man had watched Sansa as they'd entered as had every other, but he alone hadn't pored over her with the fervent eye of discovery. He hadn't needed to. He'd seen her before, seen them both, had heard, knew; this was plain in his averted face, his quiet patience. Urs was not the only one who had come from King's Landing.

The Hound frowned into the dark of his wine, and thought, and waited.


	38. Chapter 38

It was deep night now and the inn had quieted. The hearth had gone low and orange. Two of the kitchen girls had snuck to the benches with a tart of prunes and marrow for the favorite, a tall spare quiet youth with a quiver and wide-spaced brown eyes, and, once kissed, ran laughing back. Men left in loud slurring clumps and the serving girl had long since sighed her way to the kitchen to undo her laces. The room, cooling, smelt of smoking duck and the fresh split pine the pot-boys had carried in for the morning. A cat wound through the empty benches, and the man in the goatskin shirt, made safe by the warm calm and by the Hound's half-closed lids, rose quietly, shuffled into a shabby cloak, and left.

When the man heard the inn door creak again behind him and the shaft of light appeared before him on the ground, his pace slowed; he opened his mouth to listen. Behind him, there was a patter of gravel slipping out from a heavy step, shifting metal, a great and labored heave of breath. He sucked in air and began to run, knees high, silent on the sandy path, not looking back in the dark, straight to the wood. The way was even and he sprinted on the wings of his good fortune, the lucky recognition–the scar had made it simple–and the unclaimed reward now, so astonishingly, his. It had been almost tangible, the sour wreath of his poverty about him; now he could feel just as clearly the weight of that poverty slipping from his shoulders. He ran breathing evenly through his smile, light-footed in the dark.

The impact of the Hound, knocking into his back like a boulder, shot from him a grunt not of pain but of surprise. Then he was lying on the dirt of the Road with a black panting shape standing over him and liquid pulsing from his neck. He needed to cough, but there was far too much air.

The Hound shook his dagger clean and with his heel rolled the gurgling body into the gutter at the side of the pathway, then turned heavily and made for the inn, blood from his wet sleeve trailing after him for the first steps. The moon opened up through the clouds and the Road, shining wide and pale before him, reminded him of the high-grassed field of his father's keep, and no further thought was given to the piteous body left hidden in the gutter.

His legs were heavy and his heart too fast for his slow lungs. The edges of his vision were blacker than the night was; black and blurry, shifting with his breath. _Keys. _In the fold of his boot was the key to the bird's room. Was there another? There had been a dozen of them clanking in the apron-pocket at the little crone's hip. The bird was asleep in her room, but jangling through the inn could be a second key. Behind the inn, the safe silent wood waited for them. He pushed ahead, his legs heavier with each step. The blur jostled with his movement, crept further up his vision; he could hear his own hollow breathing low in his ears.

His horse blew softly at the trough, a reassuring mountain in the dark, and he ran his palm along the silky neck as he passed.

The hall was empty, but the kitchen was starting up again with voices, the clattering of the early bread. A pot-boy, hearing the door, looked out at him from the steaming archway of the kitchen and then turned yawning back to his handful of figs, indifferent to the blood if he saw it at all.

In the room the fire had dwindled, but the little bird was very warm in her straw bed, covered in cloaks, breathing heavily. She pushed away his hands with her soft ones and it took him a long time to wake her... He sat on the rumpled bed in the warm crescent her small weight had made, and forced away the blur while she rolled her dresses into her bag. Her face was flushed with sleep as she pulled on her slippers with one eye half-open, her temple resting on her upper arm, her bright sheet of hair swinging over it shining like water. She allowed the heel of his hand on the plane of her shoulder, pushing her gently through the doorway; allowed the press of his thumb along her spine, allowed him to lean against her, and steady himself against her. Outside, standing beside the horse, she grimaced at him, handing up her bag.

"What happened? Did they find us? Why are we leaving so soon?" Her lids were swollen from sleep and her loose bang, threaded with a tuft of straw, hung at the side of her face. Her voice was thick with drowsiness, but unnerved, and her hand stayed at his sleeve after the bag had been passed. He looked down into her small face and could say nothing, and lifted her instead. She leaned forward and, with her eyes on him, patted at the mane, anxious.

The horse, the wood and the wild flashing of the moonlight shattering through the trees rushed, pale-blue then dark-blue, in thunderous bursts. The brush whipping away from them was like brittle silver water. His eyes shut helplessly against the flashing. Up under his sleeve her fingers plucked at him and he laughed and laughed, but the sound rang faint to his own ears. Far louder was the voice of the Northern deserter: _no point going back North again, now._

Between plucks, her warm palm rested on his wrist. He leaned forward and the crown of her head knocked against his mouth. He bent in to it: tallow and rosemary from the milky soap, and under that, the familiar scent of her hair. Weaker, he rested against it. _How to tell her?_ There was now no home to bring her to. In the North, the boy raised alongside her had taken their home for his own, had ensured his conquest with the murder of her brothers. Should she ever return, he could guess at what she'd find: rooms thick with old brutality, unlivable. Nor would there ever be anything resembling that lost home. Every hand extended would also hide in its pocket a key, a cage, a means with which to avail itself of her value. At the bottom of every offered cup would lie a silt. She was safest in the wood on the horse, and he imagined in his blurry daze the wilderness stretching out without end, impervious, secure. He imagined riding endlessly through the dark with her palm as it was and her heart beating against his ribs.

It was then, jolting through the trees, that he saw the depth of her hazard. It was also then, with her hand holding his wrist in the dark, that he acknowledged his own part in it; he too had no home and he recognized his own grasping want, to carve a life for himself beside hers.

Finally, the inn was far enough behind and the rushing wood stopped. He rolled to the ground, and few things had ever been so welcome as that solidity cold against his back. She passed to and fro above his head, and dropped his blanket over him. He closed his eyes to the blur, briefly surrendering to the void that claimed him, and when he opened them she had, just in that rapid blink, lain beside him and was asleep.

_Sansa… your home…_ He'd meant to tell her before closing his eyes, but it was too late now; the opportunity had gone with her even intakes of breath. He felt debilitated, enormously so, and in his mouth the acid half-formed words sunk back down his throat. He swallowed and looked at her.

In the moonlight, her clean skin had the fragility of a petal. Behind her ear a plane of translucent down swept up and out into auburn, and her pulse beat quick there. Quietly, he leaned over her, his shadow covering her, the point of his nose brushing past the curve of her cheek, strands of her cold hair in his warm hand.

Against his scar he could feel only the pressure of her heartbeat, but against his lips she was soft. With her caught like this, in his mouth, he felt he could tell her even of his furtive want, that in the vast wilderness was a safe place and that he would ride with her tirelessly, if she so chose; stay with her if she so chose. _Sansa... _But his tongue was made of stone and she was asleep. He slid his teeth down her throat, warm silk and salt, the taste colored with the smell of her, close and secret, unbearable**.** Above, the wind swept a grey cape of clouds over the moon and the wood disappeared; he was falling down and down into the dark. With his lips against her pulse he said her name, but it became a kiss.


End file.
